Re: rights (fwd)

[Lin Zhe Min <ljm@ljm.qqjane.net>]

#1 of our discussion

Date: Mon, 01 Feb 1999 17:46:10 +0200
From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
To: Lin Zhe Min <ljm@marx.ljm.wownet.net>
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: rights

coi lin.

Apologies for writing in English rather than Lojban, but it's been a hard day
and my brain isn't working very well ...

A while back the question of language "learnability" was being debated on the
AUXLANG list, with many people saying that although Lojban was more systematic
than most constructed languages, it was too hard to learn to be serioualy
considered as an auxiliary language, while Interlingua, Occidental etc. could
be understood easily by most Europeans.  I countered by saying that while it
was true that _Europeans_ would certainly find Interlingua a lot easier than
Lojban, the reverse was probably true for non-Europeans.  In particular I
thought that Lojban would be easier for Chinese-speakers, partly because the
grammar is a bit closer to Chinese, and partly because there's so much Chinese
in the vocabulary (e.g. {hirma} has only the 'h' and 'r' of English 'horse',
but all of Chinese 'ma').  In your experience, is this true?

By the way, I studied Chinese for a year when I was at university - I found the
grammar really easy but could never remember the vocabulary.  All that stays in
my mind now are a few sentences like "Women duo hen dao duanlian" and
"Tongzhemen!  Zhanxilai!" - our textbooks were written during the Cultural
Revolution!

co'o mi'e robin.