On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:08, John E Clifford
<kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
It might be useful to list the ways in which Lojban fails to meet human language standards. I personally can't think of one (even xorlo has, alas, human analogs). Remember that at least one school of linguists think that all sentences in any natural language are merely transforms of predicate logic sentences, with minor loss of information.
Oops. In theory iirc Lojban can require processing depths that no human language in fact has (though I am not sure that there is a theory that says they can't have it) and some parts of Lojban do require keeping in mind the details of the developing sentence structure which again exceed the need in natural languages (again only in fact perhaps).
(Quoting from two different emails for convenience...)
I am, very very fortunate not be part of the school of linguistics that believes in silly things like transformations (nor Russel's teapot). When I say that Lojban violates things that human languages do, I'm not appealing in any sense to "Universal Grammar;" I'm simply say that, when you look at the languages of the world (henceforth, "languages"), certain things happen and certain things don't. Maybe they CAN, but the fact that they don't is pretty telling about human brains process speech.
I see two, maybe three, areas where there is a problem from a linguistic perspective. The first is that languages do not have verbs with more than four unmarked slots for a predicate, and there are VERY few that have four; the vast majority of verbs in the vast majority of languages have three or less. If you get more than four, you ALWAYS have some sort of marking (most often as an oblique phrase; i.e., a preposition or a postposition)) that indicates how the additional argument relates to the predicate. Yet, Lojban has gismu which take more than four arguments. If it were testable, I would put a LOT of money the fact that, after Lojban was released into the wild, you could do a text count and find that predicates rarely, if ever, have more than three arguments in them, and that the three arguments pretty much always had the three closest to the gismu.
It is worthwhile to note, especially for those who like Lojban to be mind-bending, that this fact likely has nothing to do with language, and everything to do with cognition. On average, working memory holds something like 4-7 items (try using a phone menu with 9 items; it is extremely annoying and frustrating, and makes it hard to do anything except listen to the list of options). It is thus no surprise that, in languages, four is the maximum (three arguments and a verb, with a couple verbs that take four), especially if one considers that most utterances have more than just the verbs and the arguments. I think this is what you meant by "processing depth"--the problem is that most humans actually CAN'T PROCESS at the depth needed for a gismu with seven places. You could argue that this processing depth is learnable--maybe it is, but I'd bet that learning to hold more in working memory is very closely
tied to how much you could process before any training. This also might be fine for a written language, since you can sit and look at a sentence, but in speech, people just aren't going to be able to process Lojban.
The second problem (or second half of this first problem) is that some of the gismu seem to have tons of extra stuff in them that is not something that would be included in the meaning of a word in any language. "Bucket," for example, contains a predicate slot for the material the bucket is made from. This, as far as I could tell, was thrown in to make the gismu have more slots. The material a bucket is made of has far less to do with bucketness than, say, all of the things in klama have to do with going. And why does "bucket" have it and not, say, "bird"? I can call something that isn't a living bird (say, a drawing of a bird), but why doesn't it a gismu slot to indicate it's material? If buckets get a slot for material, so should everything.
Both of these things are easily fixed, though, without totally barfing up Lojban. There might be a few special gismu that have more than four slots, but for most, the additional slots should really be looked at to see if they are needed, along with the weird ones in words like "bucket." A handful of cmavo (or even gismu) for things like "material made of" would be much more widely useable, as would a very general something like "means."
The third thing is more of a pet peeve, and not something I would actually like to see changed (although it is worth considering if a new LoCCan is created), and that is that the process of word creation results in things which are very, very similar--all gismu, for example, have a set structure which is clearly delimited. Although this is very logical and makes it easy to point at a word and tell, completely unambiguously, if it is a gismu or not, it is simply not how languages work. For example, the words for colors in English have no clear relationship to each other, nor that class to the class of intransitive verbs. But, in Lojban, EVERYTHING that makes a predicate looks like everything else that makes a predicate. I would very much doubt that memorizing the 1300 or so gismu in Lojban would be at all comparable to learning 1300 of, say, Spanish, because there is more for your brain to stick to. (This
is also part of my objection to Jorge's language-name proposal, but I'll address that separately.)
So, there 'tis--what the linguist doesn't like about Lojban (which, it is worth noting, is far less than what he DOES like, but still).
Chris
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.