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Re: [lojban] Re: Cultural Neutrality
On 7/11/06, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
--- Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Cultural neutrality in Lojban comes down to creating a language that
> is easy for anyone of any culture or language to use. A large
> component of this is not using a single language as the base, because
> odds are, that language will be harder for one segment of the audience
> to learn, and easy for another.
>
> Favoring Lojban over other languages is acceptable. Lojban's
> phoneme-set is supposedly simple for one of any culture/language to
> learn, and offers variant pronounciations. 90% (arbitrary figure) of
> people should have no problems pronouncing Lojban. That all their
> phonemes are not included is no big deal.
>
> Neutrality isn't about including every language, giving every language
> a part to play (as if people will be sore that their language isn't
> included), it's about making Lojban easy for everyone to speak.
Still one would hope that cultural neutrality was more than having a phoneme set that was easy for
everyone to pronounce -- it sounds like something important and exciting. And, of course, Lojban
is not too good on even this: every base langauge has a problem with at least one phoneme and some
with many more. And once you get off that top half dozen or so, the problems multiply. And then
there are those consonant clusters, which are problems altogether for some languages and
particular ones for most. To get a really "neutral" phonology you have to go to something like
toki pona, with only the five vowels and just ptkslnmy (spelled j)w. No initial clusters, no
double vowels, only syllable final is n (pronounced m before p and never occurring before m or n)
Some tradeoff must be made, I think, between cultural neutrality and
not leaving the language with too few phonemes, and hence long words.
Phonemes that were common to many languages were included, ones that
were troublesome in many were excluded. Learning any new language is
hard, I don't think that it's one of Lojban's goals to be ridiculously
easy to pronounce (at the expense of...).
Does Lojban now have any phonemes that are hard to pronounce in many
languages? What options exists to aid the Spanish speaker who does not
do well with the pairs that xorxes described? I think that it is
better to come up with alternatives, like I think the ability to use
the /th/ sound for /x/, than to chop out a phoneme.
Neutrality is more than having an easy phoneme set, it's about doing
our best to include all language speakers. /x/ may be hard for the
English speaker, /b/ or /v/ may be hard for the Spanish, but /th/
isn't included at all.
I think that a lot of people must attach some interesting meaning to
culture-neutrality, though the major aspects of it aren't anything
special in Lojban. Most of the things that Lojban treats as culture
neutrality aren't really very cultural. I find it hard to imagine that
the choice of including /t/ but excluding /b/ is culture-based. It's
just the way some languages are. Same goes for SVO vs VOS. It's not
like these restrict what we can say or how often we say it in any
critical sense, they're just two variants.
Truly cultural things would be hard to come by at this point. I assume
that 'long' ago, bananas were only heard of in some parts of the
world, while some other gismu-food only existed in some other part,
and so excluding those from the gismu list would have been good,
because supposedly the ability to think of one and not the other would
affect us.
Cultural neutrality isn't about sharing the 'language cake' with every
child in a very fair manner, so that no crying ensues. I think that
this is the way most people see it, as if we have to be extremely
fair, and oh no, we shouldn't include a topping because English likes
the bread and dislikes that over-sweet whatever. Cultural neutrality
is about making all the options available, including sprinkled
monkey-meat, and about not including peanuts if Arabic has a deathly
allergy that would make her incapable of eating any of the cake.