Re: [lojban] Logos Initiative

I remember the Wycliffers at SIL (in the recruitment movies; I never went) with penny whistles illustrating the contours of various types of utterances in English and other languages -- more than just the falling final of statements or the rising of questions and the rise that went with the stress in contrasts. There point was (as I recall) that we don't notice it much in English and thus it is hard to spot in other languages but it is an important factor in natural vs foreign accents, for example. I suspect that most fluent Lojban speakers simply use the contours of their L1s in Lojban as well. In fact, they say, most speech is singing (on a very narrow range and a long line) with only the lyrics changing a lot from sentence to sentence. This certainly seems to be true of Toaq Dzu and guaspi based on the short sketches from Google. They seem merely more aware -- and thus more controlled -- than most natural languages. Some credit to Ranger Rick for the point, even if the terminology was wrong (and the relevance, of course).

On Tuesday, September 23, 2014 4:49 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

Gleki Arxokuna, On 23/09/2014 17:18:
> 2014-09-23 18:03 GMT+04:00 And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com>>:
> Gleki Arxokuna, On 23/09/2014 13:44:
> 2014-09-23 16:28 GMT+04:00 And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com> <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com>>>:
> Gleki Arxokuna, On 16/09/2014 17:57:
> Second, the "clearly defined connection" between the dictionaries would work only if for each word in the one language there is a word in the other language that always translates it, and this one-to-one translation is explicitly stated.
>
> The only way this is going to happen is if the two languages are deliberately designed to be intertranslatable.
>
> Since this project is/would be based on Loglan and Lojban then it is implied.
>
> I don't think it is implied.
>
> The Logos Initiative clearly states the sources.

What document are you looking at? I can't find anything relevant, and what I have seen in passing does not imply that being "based on" or "sourced from" Lojban will entail intertranslatability with Lojban. Indeed, anything intertranslatable with Lojban would immediately suffer the very failings of Lojban, when the project is intended to remedy Lojban's failings. That is, you want a logical language to yield a logical formula, not to yield a translation into Lojban, which does not yield a logical formula.

> english is a tonal language.
>
> It isn't a tone language. Whether tone plays any role at all in English (i.e. intonation) is debatable; it's generally held that it does, and I think that it probably indeed does, but the evidence is not overwhelming.
>
> Indeed. Indeed?

Indeed. Do the rules that specify licit English sentences include specification of tone? My answer is "Probably yes, but that isn't as obvious as most people assume it is", tho I say that on the basis only of a cursory study of English intonation.

> i wonder if there are non tonal languages except lojban.
>
> There are thousands that are as tonal as Lojban is.
>
> Most known examples?

The large majority of other invented languages besides Lojban are not tone languages, and of those, only a tiny minority have any specification for intonation. I suppose you might argue that Lojban's putative audiovisual isomorphism means it cannot have intonatioal rules, whereas for most invented languages intonation rules are merely unspecified rather than forbidden. If you were to argue that then I will concede your point. (My own loglang has tone but -- by design -- not intonation.)

--And.

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