Re: [lojban] Cultural fu'ivla: summary and list of the ISO generated ones

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Christopher Doty wrote:
> I mean, I think I kind of understood this last part.  I thought the idea 
> was that Lojban would perhaps, at some point, serve a rather 
> international function.  If that's really not the goal, that's 
> fine--I'll shut up and remove myself from the lists.

I hope you don't.

But, no, that is not "the" goal, and was in fact explicitly disavowed as 
such because we offend Esperantists who think we are competing with 
them, and we offend linguists, who as a class tend to disparage the 
"international language" movement (and this disavowal indeed helped me 
in discussing Lojban with the linguistic community).

But it is a goal for some Lojbanists, and it is one that we do not 
disparage, even while not making it a formal goal that might drive 
decision-making.

There is certainly an international aspect to Lojban in the sense that 
any linguistics research using Lojban would need to use speakers of 
multiple natural languages, especially of unrelated families, to give 
credible results.

> Real languages do things that are WAY more mind-bending than Lojban; I have no reason to 
> be interested in or study the language if it's only purpose is to 
> mind-bend, since it fails at that, as far as I'm concerned. 

I'm sure there are a few things that would qualify %^)

As an example for a linguist: All languages have raising phenomena, but 
Lojban's sumti-raising is both explicit and extremely powerful (and I 
personally find lambda calculus to be more mind-bending than I can 
handle %^).

Most languages have several words corresponding to our attitudinals, but 
again I think Lojban goes far beyond any of them, and allows productive 
compounding, which I don't think exists in natural language attitudinals 
(though I won't be offended if you know an example).

The tense stuff all comes from natural languages - several different 
ones.  No *one* language puts so many tools for expressing tense in one 
place: ZAhO, TAhE, etc.  And then there are the time-travel tenses. 
Will speakers use all these things?  That's what we'll hopefully find out.

But if we put too much "real languages do things this way" into Lojban, 
we are basically limiting the possibilities.  We don't know all the ways 
that real languages do things, and we cannot know the full range of how 
they MIGHT do them.  Lojban is a test bed that allow people to try 
things that they cannot in their native language, and to use expressive 
tools in combination that no extent natural language has.

--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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