Re: [lojban] Questions about Lojban

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 2:17 PM, <afkecatha@gmail.com> wrote:

Assuming that you are familiar with the idea of the Sapir-Whorf theory, which claims that people speaking a different language will percieve reality in a different way, our main question is whether you would agree with this theory or not. Does being able to speak in a different, logical language also mean that you are able to think in a different, logical manner?

At first when I started studying Lojban I thought the Sapir-Whorf theory seemed quite interesting, and I was looking forward to experiencing for myself whether I thought it was true. But then years of casual chatting in Lojban didn't subjectively seem to change my thought processes much at all, so I pretty much forgot about the idea actually, or I guess I started to think that it wasn't a very coherent hypothesis. But I started to take it seriously again just very recently when I've actually starting trying for the first time to think all the time all day primarily in Lojban, and it actually started to feel weird.

I feel I should explain that "logic" as such has little to do with the ways in which Lojbanic thinking is deeply strange. Learning the logical operators in Lojban surely changes one's mind, but not in any distinctly different way than learning the same logical operations in the context of English, so far as I can tell. What's distinctly different about Lojban, and pervasively different, is its neutrality. By this I mean not just its famed "klunu'i" or cultural neutrality, though we do our best at that. What I mean by neutrality is a certain tasteless central neutral flavor that is the heart and soul of Lojban. Lojban in its deepest hidden secret self is a plain unsalted cracker without the cracker, a blank canvas without the canvas without the blankness, an empty space but without all the pesky salty sour somethingish flavor of any disturbing presence of any emptiness.

Perhaps the most perfectly Lojbanic of Lojban sentences is the sentence " ", the empty sentence, which of course asserts nothing at all about anything, and does so in perfect elegance. All of Lojban springs from this emptiness. The sentence "prenu", person, shares little of the deep character of English sentences like "there is a person" or "there are people", because really it does nothing put throw the stone of personness into the perfect emptiness. One single perfect ripple spreads across all of creation. To assert existence, truth, knowledge, particularity, takes adding other different words-- "prenu" puts only its otherwise flavorless personness into a void. English does not have such sentences. English does not even have that void. So indeed, I'm increasingly coming to believe, an English speaker does not nearly as often have such thoughts.

And seeing that Lojban (most probably) is not your first language, do you believe that people are able to learn to change the way they percieve reality, just like they are able to learn a new language? So for example, does someone who can speak a Native American language as well as regular English have the possibility to view reality in two different ways?

I've learned just a little of a Native American language (Potawatomi). Even with the tiny amount I've learned it's obvious that the language itself directly implies a radically different perspective on the world. The animacy marking for instance doesn't correspond to any concept in European languages/philosophies of which things are animate, and so learning it necessarily means entering into a very different perspective on the world.

I don't think it's impossible at all to learn to see from a deeply different perspective, it's just rather difficult and it's not clear at first why you should bother. Learning a new language to the level where you begin to feel the deep differences in its perspective takes many many many hours of study.

Is this the reason you are so interested in Lojban, because it enables you to think and percieve the world more logically? And if not, where did your interest for the Lojban language come from?

I was once a conlang shopper. That's what I've started calling it, by analogy to how people are said to "shop" for a church to attend. Some people just want to learn a conlang and they don't know which one. I learned some Esperanto, as most do. And I learned a few words of Klingon, etc. But Lojban is where I've made my home.

I like what Lojban is but I like even more what it's in the process of becoming. It feels to me like a giant conlanging project still in progress, just in further progress than any individual conlanger's project has ever gotten. What I like about language is making up meanings, ways of _expression_, the subtle interesting bits, I don't care about starting over from scratch and choosing a new word for "cat." I was happy to learn that here "mlatu" is cat, and "lat" is the short form, but then even more interested to later learn when someone made "jbolatmi'a" Lojban-cat-laugh for LOLcats captioned in Lojban, and I'll be excited of course if I made a -lat- word and see other people using it, but I'm most of all looking forward to learning a thousand more words with -lat- in them from a thousand new Lojbanists as they join us. To me a new language of this complexity and richness being born in front of our eyes is a remarkable unusual special treasure.

mu'omi'e la stela selckiku