Re: Dao De Jing [was Re: Promoting Lojban]

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

>On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Lin Zhemin wrote:
>> What I meant by "limited" is from the meaning of Sapir-Wholf theory,
>> that if the language is based on predicate logic, its native speakers'
>> scope will be limited by it, making some illogical statement hard for
>> them to understand, unless they learn another language or study in
>> another culture. And I know Lojban is expressive, while we're all
>> strangers in Lojbanistan. :-)   

Loglan/Lojban was designed to test the S/W Hypothesis in the inverse way.
Natural languages do not have the capacity to easily express many logical
expressions clearly and unambiguously - examples include OR/XOR confusion,
and conditional IF and causality.  JCB's concept was to invent a language
that would REMOVE restrictions on logical and unambiguous speech, and see
if it would result in more logical and unambiguous thinking (oversimplified
summary).  Similarly the attitudinals might remove restrictions on emotion
(and emotional communication) based on inability to express them adequately
- JCB's original idea here was to separate the logical claims of a sentence
from the attitudinal component, which also supports "logicality".  I added
to this with mabla and zanru which allows you to separate the denotation of
the word from emotional connotations.  Especially in certain types of
writing, one would be able to invoke kalci or gletu as concepts without the
emotionally laden terms, or maybe even mention Hitler without it
necessarily temrinating a Usenet discussion zo'o.

lojbab