[lojban] Re: S-W/ was Re: (no subject)/Borges

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

Skipping my usual screeds on this topic, I'll just summarize.  The effects on world-view and
habitual behavior is attributed to obligatory grammatical categories of a language.  So,
vocabulary plays no role in the matter at all (JCB's elaborate but basically unsuccessful gismu
building notwithstanding).  Jim's path to a neutral position in this area was to reduce the number
of obligatory grammatical categories as far as possible/ feasible. And to provide the means of
presenting all of the possible array of categories in a give area with about equal complexity --
as options.  This is done pretty well for things like time and space perceptions  (Loglan/Lojban
can do absolute positions and directions with approximately the same amount of apparatus as the
relative ones (you need to set a 0, but that would presumably be a given in a culture that did
this sort of thing).  And the same goes for several other areas.  But, of course, it fails
radically for the most fundamental pasrt of ontology.  Grammatically, Lojban/Loglan is the most
SAE language available: everything is a unitary thing with properties and relations: no masses (in
the usual sense), no processes (except as special things), no sensual atoms (ditto) and so on
through the rane of known ontologies, let alone the unknown.  To be sure, all of these other views
can be constructed, but, as noted, always as a strange kind of thing -- grammatically speaking. 
Lojban is great for testing S-W on Menominee or maybe Chinese but not so hot for English (etc.
through the usual SAE). I'm not sure what a neutral language, without a fundamental ontology -- or
with all fundamental ontologies equally available -- would look like, but L?L ain't it.  Which is
not a practical problem, since no one has come up with a reasonable version of S-W that is not
either trvial or blatantly false.  (Hey, I manged to get most of my screeds in anyhow).




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