Re: [lojban] la .alis.

[Michael Everson <michael.everson@gmail.com>]

On 29 Mar 2010, at 15:17, Minimiscience wrote:

> de'i li 29 pi'e 03 pi'e 2010 la'o fy. Michael Everson .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
>> To the unfocused eye, Lojban is no different from Basque in its
>> non-Indo-Europeanism. ;-)
> 
> Good!  Almost the entire point of Lojban and Loglan is to create a language unlike any natural one and see what happens.

My point was that, non-Indo-European as it is, Basque still enjoys the richness of Latin typographic conventions. 

> Trying to make Lojban more like widely-spoken languages defeats the whole point of attempting to isolate a Sapir-Whorf effect or whatever it is we're supposed to be doing.

The Sapir-Whorf hyphothesis has nothing **whatsoever** with writing. English can be written in Latin letters, Greek letters, Runes, Verdurian, Shavian, Deseret or IPA, and it makes no difference at all in terms of what Sapir-Whorf is about. 

> Differences in orthography force learners to think about the language more and, hopefully, improve the way they think in general.

Well, as an expert in writing systems, I think that's a pretty baseless assertion. Reading English in Deseret or Shavian does not make you think about English differently. 

I don't mean to be grumpy about it, but that's really just nonsense. (Quite apart from Alice.)

Michael

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