Re: [lojban] Re: lojban and PR

["John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

SAE is a Whorfian term and has very little to do with the specifics of word class and paradigms.  It has more to do with the metaphysical view of the language.  SAE languages are based on things doing stuff and having properties.  Other languages are based on processes going on or masses dividing or kinds manifesting themselves.  The issue in which all the unfortunate weird stuff turns up is more or less an effort to see what sort of language Lojban is and to what extent it can mirror the other kinds.  As spoken first (or so) order logic, it is clearly SAE in its most Aristotelian form, some say it can be viewed as a mass/ kind language as well.  

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On Oct 27, 2011, at 9:12, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:

> On Thursday 27 October 2011 05:14:58 Sebastian Fröjd wrote:
>> ok,
>> just to summarize the discussion here.
>> It seems that none of you think that it's a good idea to missionize lojban
>> around the world right now (even if I would like to do just that here in
>> Sweden when my lojban-skills are better).
>> Instead you would like to improve the language itself first. Some of you
>> would like to make huge changes (like Muhammed), that would make it a
>> totally different language. I don't see why really, since I think lojban
>> generally has a great grammatical structure. Others (including me) would
>> like to make less significant changes, for example to revise some of the
>> word definitions (especielly to be consistent about name of species,
>> colours, scientifical and metaphysical concepts etc).
> 
> I'd like to see more Lojbanists whose first language isn't Indo-European. The 
> claim comes up frequently when there's a technical discussion that Lojban is 
> Standard Average European. It's obvious from its grammar that it's not:
> *All European languages have grammatical number. Lojban doesn't.
> *Most European languages have accusative alignment. Basque has ergative 
> alignment. Lojban has an indefinitely long sequences of argument places, 
> which occurs in no natural language as far as I know.
> *All European languages have nouns (including common nouns), verbs, and 
> adjectives, of which normally only verbs show tense. Lojban has no adjectives 
> and uses verbs, which show tense, for common nouns and adjectives as well as 
> verbs.
> I think that the appearance of SAE comes from most Lojbanists being native 
> speakers of European languages, and if we got more Lojbanists whose native 
> language have evidentials, tensed adjectives, and other non-European 
> features, the appearance would disappear.
> 
> I would like to see a few changes, such as:
> *drop the dimension place from "mitre" and express it some other way which 
> would also work with "gucti"
> *add x2 to "remna"
> *allow BIhI to have only one GAhO (there is a construction that would have to 
> be disambiguated).
> 
>> I agree with Pierre Abbat that some of the discussions here are
>> incomprehensible (hey I don't even speak english as my native language as
>> you probably can see).
> 
> It's not the language that makes it incomprehensible, it's the references to 
> L-sets, Chierchia, Skolem functions, and other things that one hears about 
> only in certain university courses, which I haven't taken.
> 
> Pierre
> -- 
> sei do'anai mi'a djuno puze'e noroi nalselganse srera
> 
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