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Re: [lojban] Summary: Cultural fu'ivla
Christopher Doty wrote:
I do not find it particularly rude,
Thanks. I was trying not to be, but my tact skill has never been
particularly strong, and it has been tested today in numerous ways (not
all of them Lojban-related).
and am happy that I can think about
this as it would be a waste of time. Am I missing some part of the site
that would have let me know that this idea has already been proposed and
rejected over and over?
I don't know. It has been a long, long time since I had any clue what
was on the site and where. I can read a wiki page, but my mind doesn't
exactly grasp how a wiki system really works.
If you are interested in the key ideas behind the language, and the
decisions that guided us in language development, one excellent place
would be to read the issues of Ju'i Lobypli, which was our irregular
journal until around 1994.
http://www.lojban.org/files/jl/
http://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt
has a chunk of stuff from JL6, which included a good deal of reference
to cultural and metaphysical neutrality.
I just looked, and the wiki topic "cultural neutrality" actually seems
to deal with this pretty well, if briefly.
http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure-utf/lingissues.html#AEN12681
also is good.
There is a Lojban FAQ that says
•What you you mean by "culturally neutral"?
◦Lojban makes explicit the cultural biases that are often inherent in
> people's use of language. It does so by having its own bias: but this is
a bias towards the conventions of formal logics, rather than of a
specific human language or culture.
Ah. I just came up with the right answer. Go to Google Groups and
search for "cultural gismu criteria". Most of the messages are relevant
(and of course those I wrote are most relevant %^) Just "cultural
gismu" in quotes gives others. Again, to find out the "why" of most
language design decisions, focus on stuff before 1995, the earlier the
better.
> Everything I have seen there makes it look like
it is something that has been, and still is, ongoing.
I *can* answer that. Because anyone and everyone can change the wiki,
on any given topic it is heavily weighted towards whatever the most
recent editors are thinking. If there is institutional memory therein,
it is probably in the pages that haven't been changed in several years.
More importantly, most LLG policy predates the wiki and the only things
that get put onto wiki pages are things that people want to write. Thus
the page on "cultural gismu" has only peoples' criticisms of it, but
doesn't have anything about the reasoning that was used to put them into
the language (which has numerous stages, starting with work done by JCB
40-odd years ago)
LLG policy tends to stagnate for several years. Ongoing stuff is what
people want to work on *now* and may have nothing at all to do with what
people wanted last year or what LLG policy is. For the most part, the
formal part of LLG doesn't get involved
I must say I find the disconnect between the claims of cultural neutral
The claim of cultural neutrality is a relative one.
and violation of those claims in the very vocabulary of the language to
be completely weird. Illogical, even.
As you will find as you explore the places discussing the topic, being
logical itself is a cultural bias. So we mustn't be TOO logical %^).
lojbab
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