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[lojban] Re: Why linguists might be interested in Lojban (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism



And Rosta wrote:
Lojbab:

At 04:46 PM 10/6/02 +0100, And wrote:

Lojbab:

At 05:32 PM 10/5/02 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

Lojbab:

Finally and most importantly for one key Lojbanic purpose,

Remind us what purpose it is, and why it is important?

Use of Lojban for linguistic research (which requires that Lojban have
enough properties of a natural language that any research findings are
deemed "interesting" to linguists)

But why is it important,

We're getting circular.  Because it is a key Lojbanic purpose, the main
reason why the Loglan Project was started.


Not quite circular:

You: Lojban needs to go the Naturalist route in order to be interesting
to linguists.
Me: (A) Why does it need to be interesting to linguists? (B) It is more
likely to interest linguists if it goes the Engineerist route.

If I remember rightly, the key purpose in question was to have a
language that was 'whorfianly neutral', so that usage could then be
examined to see if there were any whorfian interferences from the L1.
(Correct me if I'm wrong -- you're clearer on this than me.) But
the Naturalist route wants to complete the creation process through
usage, in which case there is inevitably going to be massive L1
interference, but not of an interesting sort, because it won't
be counterposed to any defined whorfianly neutral grammar.

.iesai From a linguistic point of view, it is exactly this potential tension between grammar and usage which would be interesting. to illustrate the point in a rather absurd way, I once ran a cyberpunk-style role-playing game in which Lojban was a lingua franca for geeks. The two Lojbanisms that really caught on amongst the players were "mabla" (correct usage) and "le do mamta cu gerku" (incorrect, in canonical Lojban).

robin.tr




--
"We do not imprison ourselves with laws, or impoverish ourselves with money" - Iain Banks

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Universitesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin