[lojban] Re: How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?

["Brett Williams" <mungojelly@gmail.com>]

On 9/17/08, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

I have a *completely* non-professional suspicion I've been holding
on to for a while: I wonder if Lojban would be easier for autistics
to communicate in, because of the attitudinals and the strict
structure?

If so, that'd be an interesting semi-Sapir-Whorf effect.

I'm diagnosed with Asperger's, a related condition to autism, and I find Lojban much easier to communicate in.  My impression is that it's  only in small part because of the structure of the language, and more directly because of the attitude of the community toward the use of the language.  For instance, it's not just that there are attitudinals like {.ui} or {.ii}, but that there is this *directness* collectively understood in the semantics of them: You really do say {.ui} because you feel happy, and {.ii} because you feel scared.  And you can say {.ui}  in *any* circumstance where you feel happy-- English has a word "wee!", but you can use it only a certain social configuration: It's casual, childish, frivolous, etc.  Because Lojban's words have this feeling of being "logical", in this aesthetic sense of being above the fray, they lack some of the implicit social patterns (confusing to autistic spectrum people) that are hidden in most natlang words. 
 
 My belief about Sapir-Whorf is that thought is  somewhat strongly conditioned by language, but mostly by unconscious functions of language.  By sharing a label that implicitly groups some referents, selbangu collectively establish socially constructed divisions in reality.  Those territorial lines between semantic spaces are constantly shifting unconscious landscapes, and the dense information stored in those collective thought-pools is repeatedly communicated to all of the selbangu along with the superficial content of each utterance.  I believe therefore that Lojban's future effect on the human mind is as half-complete as the semantic pictures underlying the gismu places.  Only the most used places have the awake living character of well-loved words.  Most of our language is sitting dusty and dry.  I think there's a tremendous amount of unused potential storage space in those unconscious semantic terrains, and what we put into those deep meanings will determine much of the character of what it's like to think in Lojban in the future. 
 
mu'o mi'e se ckiku