[lojban] Cultural Neutrality

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

While it was at first a little hard to see what ZOI had to do with cultural neutrality, it
eventually emerged (sorta) that the fact that expression in any language (eventually, any medium)
could be inserted into Lojban with equal ease meant that no language/culture was favored.  The
proposal in which this point was involved was to give Lojban as phonetic alphabet (auxiliary to
its everyday one) so that such insertions would be as accurate presentations of the original as
possible, rather than necessarily restricted to the phonemes of Lojban.  In this way, for a
phonetically skilled speaker at least, every language would indeed be represented as
easily/accurately as any other. Nothing seems to have come of this proposal, since Lojban speakers
already can insert bits of any language (in a very broad sense)â?? rendered as accurately as the
speaker is able or inclined -- into their speech and the writer may insert foreign passages â??
and indeed Lojban passages â?? in any symbol system he chooses.  The suggestion came down then
only to setting a standard phonetic alphabet, which seemed outside the purposes â?? and competence
â?? of the Lojban community. 

What comes away from all that is the notion that cultural neutrality is about not giving
preference to one language/culture over another.  Indeed, JCB once (on one of the rare occasions
when cultural neutrality got some discussion) held that Loglanâ??s neutrality consisted in (or did
so mainly) the fact that there were no obligatory sentence modifications but all the various
possibilities were available.  Thus, any pattern of modifications was equally possible and easy in
Loglan (and, presumably also in Lojban, which, if anything, has a broader set of possibilities).  

But â??cultural neutralityâ?? *sounds* like a lot more than being able to locate events temporally
by any known (and many unheard of) systems.  The question, What more is involved?, seems not to
have been discussed much and is a difficult one â?? the more so if we want it to be the case that
Lojban has it.  We have already noted the ability to find a place for expressions in any other
language â?? and ability all languages have.  What comes after that?

Thinking of culture in linguistic terms -- the way the language works â?? we can come up with a
number of things distinctive of various languages, word order, for example. Lojban is SVO at
heart, but can be SOV at no cost.  VSO strictly costs a word, though this is often omitted.  OSV
costs two words, as do OVS and VOS.  One could say that the cost is proportionate to the
commonality of the order type (though that ground for exceptions is already very culturally
connected in some other sense) or that a word or two (and they are very short) is insignificant. 
One could multiply such examples indefinitely: cases, articles, grouping, and so on.  One could
notice how the vocabulary is drawn from all the major languages (ah, but not from all languages!).
 One could think of prosodic factors (but Lojban is not very flexible here, certainly not up to
tight forms like heroic couplets).  

But none of these seems to be much like what we think of when we hear â??culture.â?? (Well, the
stuff about poetry sounds a bell.)  From Anthro 1 we remember that culture is the totality of
institutions, mores, interactions, lore, and so on of a society.  That sounds more like it, but
now it is a little hard to see what language has to do with it.  Well, there is vocabulary: the
language of a culture has words for the things the culture finds essential, generally the more
essential the easier.   (But Anthro 1 also teaches that the inference from vocabulary to culture
or conversely is very unreliable.) So, maybe one feature of cultural neutrality is that Lojban can
have the words for the essential of any culture with about equal ease.  But, of course, the
easiest words in Lojban are the gismu, a restricted set and one that indicates (to make the
dangerous inference) a certain culture, which thus is preferred.  Beyond that culture, since the
gismu are used to expand the vocabulary, it would seem that a cultureâ??s essentials would be the
more easily named the closer that culture was to Lojbanâ??s.  

So maybe it is not the things in a culture that are important but the social mechanisms of the
culture. Lojban has devices for dealing with the verbal aspects of such interactions: honorifics,
polite and rude ways to begin, end and interrupt a conversation, to greet and part, and so on,
ways to express emotions of almost any recognizable sort (including some blanks to be filled in as
needed).  But still, people tend to think that vocabulary, even of this sort is a relatively minor
part of a languageâ??s involvement in a culture (the general contempt for the Eskimo snow word
joke).  

When people who really get involved in the issue think about the relation between language and
culture and what it means to say that a language favors one culture (or conversely),  they
generally mean something about the epistemology or metaphysics of the culture (using those terms
as amorphously as they are in Lojban lore).  It is said that people who have languages different
in the relevant respects see the world differently, divide it differently, select different
factors as significant (indeed, as present at all), have different expectations and explanations
for â??the sameâ?? event. And so on. In the classic formulations (well, that is a little
overstated) of this study (von Humboldt, Sapir, Whorf), the relevant features of a language is its
fundamental grammatical categories: Are its basic units (roughly) verbs, nouns, adjectives, or
some mixture or coalescing of these â?? or something else altogether.  Cultural neutrality in this
case would seem to mean something like: all of the possible categories are equally present and can
be combined in any pattern.  

At first glance it might seem that Lojban comes through as neutral here, since its basic words,
the gismu, are indistinguishably nouns, adjectives and verbs.  But when the tests are applied,
Lojban turns out to be the most despised (Hey, I didnâ??t say this was objective science) of
Language types, Standard Average European â?? and, indeed, the most SAE language ever.  The SAE
pattern is noun phrases that stand for individual, isolated things, either individually or in
temporary cooperation, which receive properties and participate in activities.  Most natural SAE
languages have some exceptional cases, mass nouns, for example, which refer to amorphous
substances, which to be sure, are usually chopped up into chunks that behave as individuals. 
Lojban has no mass nouns, even the words for water and air are count.  And a sentence is some of
these countable things receiving a property or participating in an event.  Mass-noun-like talk is
possible in Lojban but only as cooperative by little pieces of things (i.e, the mass is built up
of individuals, rather than the individuals being cut from the mass).  Other grammatical
(metaphysical) patterns are even harder to reproduce: all verb languages, all adjective languages,
even all noun ones. 

So, if we are to hold that Lojban is culturally neutral, we need to come up with a new meaning for
the term.  And in any case, if we are going to say it, we need to explain what it means. 



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