Re: [lojban] Better Communication of Ideas

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 10:34 AM 6/27/03 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> To: <langdev@yahoogroups.com>
> From: "Leo J. Moser" <leo@acadon.com>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 10:09:13 -0700
> Subject: [langdev] Better Communication of Ideas
>
> I have a question that begins with Lojban.

...

> What are the words and related vocabulary/terminology
> features of Lojban (in contrast to a natlang like English)
> that are found by users to be the most useful in actual
> practice. I'm talking not of the overall structure or its
> logical system, more of specific terms and/or grammatical
> particles that are found useful in communicating more
> clearly.

In Lojban, here are things I have found useful that are not easily 
expressed or understood in English:

1) attitudinals, and their clear distinction from the claim of a sentence.

2) the perfective tenses of ZAhO, and the perception of the structure of 
events that I see as a result of them (this made the learning of the 
perfective/imperfective distinction in Russian easy for me, when I 
understand that most English speakers find it hard, so this is a very 
useful paradigm even beyond Lojban)

3) the concept of abstraction and sumti-raising embedded into the grammar

4) the clearer distinctions between kinds of causality (something I don't 
think has been well explored in Lojban yet).

5) the unlimited expansibility of the language through the concept of 
tanru.  English can probably do this by compounding, and German can do it 
even better, but in Lojban it is basic to the language.

6) the distinction between logical connection and mixed connection (JOI)

7) the difference between contradictory and scalar negation

> In this, the comments of users is most important. What
> words, particles, terms, do they "fall in love with" in
> Lojban -- and find sadly lacking in all or many natlangs?

I first fell in love with tanru, specifically with the clarity that allows 
the distinctions of "pretty little girls school" to be elucidated.  I also 
liked the concept of audiovisual isomorphism.

I discovered the intricacies of causality in reading Comrey's books early 
in the redesign.  I made sure to preserve and expand upon Lojban's ability 
to work with causality, even while lacking the philosophical understanding 
to use the tools I put into the language (or to be sure my solution was 
adequate).  I still don't know how useful the causals could be to someone 
who was comfortable with them.

In redesigning the language, I next found tense in general to be an arena 
of interest, though the tense system then was quite different from what it 
is now.  Early in the design, John Clifford (pc) taught me about the 
perfectives and the structure of events, which were added by us as an 
afterthought to JCB's language, but later became more clearly important to 
the language when Nick Nicholas started using them with comfort.

The exploration of the first language users in 1989 led to the solid 
studies of sumti-raising, negation, and attitudinals.

Attitudinals I now think offer the greatest potential to allow expression 
of things truly difficult in English.  They parallel what on Usenet has 
become a small set of smileys and acronyms that mean things to different 
people, and expand that concept enormously.

I think it is attitudinals or perhaps the structure of events that is most 
likely to result in what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis predicts.

> What helps in everyday communication?

I'll leave this to others who habituate IRC, since I don't in fact use 
Lojban much in everyday communication.

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org