Re: live cultures (was: Promoting Lojban)

[Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>]

[this was a personal mail, but I'm sending the reply to the list in
case people are interested, and besides, I love the publicity ;-)]

Ivan A Derzhanski wrote:

> > la kris. cusku di'e
> > > What am I missing?
> >
> > {zo'osai} the fact that people _do_ write poetry in Lojban!
>
> Then again, there are those of us who reject the notion
> of poetry that does not scan and rhyme, and it would be
> damn hard to get those things in Lojban.
>

{.ienaicai}  Metre is not a problem because you can insert or delete
cmavo as you see fit! Rhyming is easier in Lojban than in English.

>
> > Things which make English difficult [...]
> > are its massive vocabulary [...]
>
> I'm not sure about that.  I'd say that English actually
> compares favourably to most other `large' languages in
> that respect.  Turkish looks like an exception to me.
> More on that anon.

> > I've just put an essay on international languages on my website

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309/ial.html

> Looked at it.  Having little use for IALs, I don't have much
> to say on the main topic, but a few comments on other things:

Well, one of the virtues of Lojban vis a vis other IALs is that it
isn't just another IAL - people use the language for whatever they
want.

> > As a friend of mine once said, the great thing about Latin
> > is that you don't need to worry about your accent.
>
> I think you do.  We can't reconstruct the exact sound of Latin,
> but that doesn't mean that we have no idea what it wasn't like.
>

The point is that because we can't reconstruct the exact sound, people
aren't so bothered about what you sound like (at least at secondary
school!).  No native speaker can criticise or make fun of your accent
(same goes for Lojban in spades, of course).

> > It may seem obvious to a Spanish speaker that the gender
> > of an adjective should be the same as that of the noun
> > it describes, but of course many languages don't have gender,
>
> And even when they do, their native speakers aren't necessarily
> thrilled to find it elsewhere.  A speaker of Spanish doesn't
> enjoy having to memorise the gender of every German noun, any
> more than a speaker of English or Turkish does.

Good point.  When I started learning Chinese all those years ago, I
was delighted by the lack of articles, tense inflections etc.

>
> > [English] is certainly expressive, having more words
> > than any other language
>
> What exactly does that mean, and how do you know that it is so?
> I don't see how it can make sense to say that one language has
> more words than another.  It's not as if the words of any living
> language formed a closed set, or as if there were precise criteria
> for wordhood in every language.  It may be the case that English
> has the fattest published dictionaries, but that is indicative
> of the zeal of the lexicographers, not of anything about the
> language itself.

I think English has a larger total vocabulary than most other
languages, though the vocabulary of a typical native speaker seems to
be the same for most, if not all, natlangs.  Modern Turkish (as Ivan
knows) has been artificially pared down.  The problem for language
learners is knowing which words to learn - it's only recently that
corpus linguistics has started giving us lists of useful; words.
Also, the students I teach have to learn speacialised vocabulary (for
Political Science and International Relations) and I'm pretty sure
English has a lot more of this.

> > [...] its ridiculous spelling, which makes
> > even many native speakers semi-literate.
>   ****
> The spelling is probably a tougher problem for native speakers
> than it is for learners.  If your knowledge of English comes
> from books, then at least you know that every word you use is
> one you've seen, so you can only misspell it if you've forgotten
> the spelling, whereas a native speaker may never have known it.

Interesting point.  What I find interesting is that my Turkish
students have a great capacity for learning English spelling, despite
speaking an unrelated language, but often mis-spell basic words (e.g.
"ougth" or "anythink").

> You've misspelt _descendant_ a few paragraphs down, btw.

{.u'i}  Guess that proves your point!

co'o mi'e robin.