[lojban] Re: Experiments in Sapir Whorf

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Wednesday 05 August 2009 16:32:57 John E Clifford wrote:
> (I'll pass over the fact that Loglan/Lojban is not well designed for the
> test, since it is not different from English in almost any possibly
> relevant way.)

I disagree. It has no distinction between common nouns, adjectives, and verbs; 
it has space tenses similar to time tenses; it has neither accusative nor 
ergative alignment, but something totally different. One point made on the 
Wikipedia page is that Guugu Yimidhirr uses north and south, not front and 
back, to state the relative positions of objects. This gives Yimidhirr 
speakers an advantage in open terrain. Lojban has both kinds of directions as 
tenses.

Lojban has no grammatical number. It does have an individual/mass/set 
distinction, which English lacks.

Lojban has a large set of conjunctions, including a one-syllable word for "if 
and only if", a word for "the intersection of ... and ...", and words for 
joining things in sets and sequences.

Pierre


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