[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[lojban] Re: (no subject)/Borges



Arika Okrent wrote:
Examine your expectations for what "neutrality" means. What do you
think the language architects meant by "culturally neutral"? I believe
this selling point was specifically designed to remedy the famous
problem of Eurocentrism in Esperanto, not to remedy anthropomorphism.


I take James Cooke Brown at his word. It was supposed to be free of
culture -- otherwise it couldn't serve as a useful experimental tool in
a test of the Whorf hypothesis (as he conceived it). Of course, lojban
has moved on from loglan and the purposes have changed. As far as I can
tell there is no explicit claim about what lojban is supposed to acheive
(or if you try to pin one down you run into a healthy tornado of
disagreement). In any case, in the story of JCB's massive 30 year
effort, the Borges quote takes on a poignant irony.

You may have some other source from JCB that addresses what he means by cultural neutrality (and so might I, but it would take some digging), but at least from what is in Loglan 1, I see no support for your assertion of JCB's meaning, and a far less ambitious goal is described:

----------------------------------

Another feature of the language that reflects its intended use as a
laboratory instrument is its cultural neutrality. Partly this has been
achieved by what we have come to call its "metaphysical parsimony," or
the fact that its grammar presupposes a reasonably small set of
assumptions about the world perhaps the smallest possible set, on our
present understanding of language structure. This feature also supports
the thought-facilitating functions of the language in some obvious, and
in some not so obvious, ways. But its original purpose was to guarantee
the metaphysical 14 neutrality of the language for speakers of widely
different native tongues. Thus any speaker, from any culture, should
find it possible to regularly express in Loglan what he takes for
granted about the world; and he will be able to do this without
imposing--or what is perhaps more to the point, without being able to
impose--these assumptions on his auditor. Thus, Loglan has many optional
grammatical arrangements, but very few obligatory ones. There is no
obligatory tense system, for example, as there is in English, nor is
there an obligatory gender system as there is in most European tongues,
nor is there an obligatory epistemic inflection of the verb as in Hopi.
But both tense and epistemic operations exist as optional "inflections"
of the Loglan "verb."

14 1 am using here Whorf's sense of the word 'metaphysical': the sense
in which a particular view of the structure of reality is "forced" on the speakers of a language by its obligatory grammatical arrangements. Of course Whorf cannot mean literally forced; since we escape these metaphysical "obligations" by several routes, among them philosophical analysis and learning second languages.

Still another element of Loglan's cultural neutrality reflects its intended use in cross-cultural experiments and possibly also as a medium of international translation. To this end I have tried to make the sounds of the basic words of the language equitably familiar to persons of very different language backgrounds. Its sounds and word-roots, for example, have been drawn with strict impartiality from the eight most widely spoken tongues. Of these eight, three are Oriental: Hindi, Japanese and the Mandarin dialect of Chinese. The other five are more likely to be familiar to readers of this book: English, Spanish, Russian, French and German. In this phonological sense Loglan is ready to be used as a "world language;" speakers of these eight languages comprise well over three-quarters of the present population of the earth. What is more germane, native speakers of any of these eight source languages will be able to hear many clues to meaning in Loglan speech. So cross-cultural comparisons of the results of learning Loglan as a second language will be possible across a broad range of native languages.

To maximize the total amount of phonological familiarity to be found in Loglan required that we use a composite system of vocabulary derivation for its "primitive" words. (By 'primitive' I mean words which are used within a language to derive its complex terms and are not themselves internally derived.15) For example, the Loglan word for 'blue' is blanu. And blanu is derived partly from Chinese 'lan', partly from English 'blue', French 'bleu' and German 'blau', and more remotely from Hindi 'nila', Spanish 'azul' and Russian 'galuboi'. Only Japanese, among the eight source languages, has no phonetic affinities with this particular Loglan word. Not all words incorporate so much familiarity, of course. But our word-building procedures have roughly maximized the total amount of it to be found in the language.16

A fourth instrumental property of Loglan bears on a functional relationship between languages that I hesitatingly call accommodation. We want the language to be small; yet we also want it to be very large. We want it to be large in the specific semantic sense of accommodating all that we might wish to say in it, either in response to urgencies developed within the language or because of those prior semantic urgencies that originate in the fact that we already speak other languages. We want, in short, to be able to speak Loglan not only like a Loglander, but also like a Trobriander or an Englishman, a Frenchman or a Chinese. This is a large order, and I am perfectly certain that I have not satisfied it. Yet the very effort to satisfy such a grand criterion has proved rewarding. More than any other functional property of the language, the installation of this one, even incompletely, has involved years of work. And the work is incomplete. It is on this point more than any other that I expect to be informed by the publication of even a fourth edition of this volume of the extent to which the grammar of Loglan does not permit the expression of meanings to which its speakers find themselves driven...whether, as I say, because of impulses generated within the language or from semantical needs coming from outside.

Yet the remarkable fact is that a very large amount of accommodation has already been built into the language without expanding its grammatical structure to those massive proportions to which linguists have accustomed us with their studies of natural grammars. One way of putting this is that the domain of permissible Loglan sentences is very large...so large, in fact, that English, say--or rather that subset of Loglan sentences which can be put into one-one, or more likely, many-one semantic correspondence with English sentences (for English is ambiguous)--fits into a very small corner of it. Yet the rules that define that vast domain are not numerous; not nearly as numerous as the rules of English are. If I am right in this observation--and of course I may not be, for Loglan may not turn out to accommodate the semantical field of English nearly as well as I think it does--then the possibility exists that for some important reason the grammars of the natural languages are far larger than they need to be. Far larger, for example, than is grammatically required to express the semantical field which they in fact engage.

-----------

So there are only two features which constitute JCB's claim of "cultural neutrality", one being metaphysical parsimony, and the other being the maximizing of phonological familiarity, through the gismu/primitive formation process. I consider what JCB calls "accommodation" to also be a facet of cultural neutrality, which is why I included that text as a third feature. Indeed accommodation was something I stressed more than JCB did *because* I noticed that it tended to also enhance the metaphysical parsimony at the same time. The results were our greatly enriched attitudinal system, the probably overdeveloped system of gadri (articles), non-logical connectives, the elaborate tense system including the perfective tenses, the varieties of abstraction, and the again probably overdeveloped MEX grammar (to name some key areas where Lojban differs from JCB's 1987 language). We also combined his case-tag system with his modal operators to get our BAI sumti tags, added negation forms based on Horn's work showing the range of that feature in natural language, and looked at causality a little more carefully (JCB tended to mix the semantics of make/madzo/Lojban zbasu with cause). And finally we added the logico-linguistic feature of sumti-raising (object-raising) which seemed to be not only a logical defect but a metaphysical imposition.

But notice that JCB did NOT say anything about making or keeping Loglan "culture-free". I think we have met JCB's standards if, for every place where a Lojbanic culture might impose a cultural assumption, there remains an alternate way to clearly express other cultural alternatives. This is one reason why I repeatedly urge people to make lujvo NOT as translations of English words, but as words that represent the concept that they want to express in Lojban, with the eventual result that Lojban might have a dozen or more words for nebulous and abstract terms like those found in Borges. This makes translation (and especially poetic translation) a good bit harder because there is no fixed one-to-one word list between other languages and Lojban, but probably makes original expression in the language (especially for non-English speakers since inevitably English semantics tends to dominate Lojban usage right now) a good deal easier because of the lack of constraints imposed by those word-translations. (Our semantically-tagged Type 3 fu'ivla borrowings also help semantic neutrality by easily adding culturally-specific vocabulary without a need to worry about semantics. One could in theory translate Borges' poem using a raft of borrowings and not have to worry as much about the semantics, because the words would mean whatever Borges meant by them. Aesthetically unpleasing but theoretically functional.)

While I have been one who resisted the movement towards rule-determined place structures (jvojva), in at least one sense, this enhances cultural neutrality. No one using the jvojva rules would ever come up with some of JCB's horrible lujvo, of which the most noted was his word for "manning a ship" which was based on the tanru that in Lojban would be "nanmu gasnu". If JCB could create an atrocity like that, there is no question that his concept of cultural neutrality included cultural semantics. (Nora believes here that JCB did eventually admit error on this word, but I am not sure an alternative word ever was coined so we would have to look in the current TLI dictionary to see whether it was corrected.)

lojbab



To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.