Re: [lojban] Questions about Lojban

["'Wuzzy' via lojban" <lojban@googlegroups.com>]

Am Sun, 25 Jan 2015 11:17:18 -0800 (PST)
schrieb afkecatha@gmail.com:


> 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. 
First of all, get your facts straight. Fact #1 is that is called
“Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, not “Sapir-Whorf theory”.
It is not a scientific theory because it lacks hard
high-quality evidence. A hypothesis is much weaker, because it is simply
an assertion without proof. At least the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
testable.

And to answer your question: Maybe? I am not really sure I know only of
a single empiric study testing the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. The finding is: Your native language indeed kinda
shapes your thought. But this effect, the so-called Whorfian effect is
quickly gone as soon as one knows more than just one's native language.

Here it is:
http://junq.info/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=37

Other than that, research about this hypothesis seems to be rare.
And I do not want to judge whether above study constitutes
high-quality evidence.

> Does being able to speak in a
> different, logical language also mean that you are able to think in a
> different, logical manner?
In my humble unscientific opinion: Not neccessarily. It is easy to say
something completely illogical and nonsensical yet completely
grammatically correct in Lojban.
The same is true for English and probably almost other languages on the
planet as well.

For example, it is grammatically correct to say in English:

    I live in Hamburg.
    Therefore, my house is blue.

But obviously it is completely illogical, the fallacy is called
“non-sequitur”. The translation into Lojban is:

    mi xabju la xamburg
    .i se ni'i bo lo zdani be mi cu blanu

This is a grammatically correct utterance in Lojban, but it is
as illogical as the English original.


> 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?
Yes.
But keep in mind: Belief is “to hold something true without evidence”,
so my answer is pretty useless. I won't deny that I have beliefs, but I
just take them really serious. I prefer knowledge over beliefs.

> Is this the reason
> you are so interested in Lojban, because it enables you to think and
> percieve the world more logically?
No.

> And if not, where did your
> interest for the Lojban language come from?
I stumpled upon this langauge by going through the darkest corners of
the World Wide Web. As I found www.lojban.org, I bacame intested
because of how it was advertised there. Yes, I admit it, I swallowed
it completely, and I do not regret it.

My main motivation to keep going is because of the interesting grammar,
that there a no “silent” (unspoken) words or grammatical marks, that
new words, even loan words, can be coined in a regular way, because of
a full set of logical connectives, because I personally like the
predicate system over the nouns/vers/adjectives/etc. system (Lojban has
no nouns, verbs and adjectives, it uses a concept called
“brivla” (“predicate words”) instead) and because of a handful of other
grammatical and syntactical features which are either not present in
German and English or only in a limited or chaotic or unsystematic way,
i.e. interjections.
In short, Lojban is interesting to me because it looks far more
structured than English and German grammatically. German and English
look chaotic and clumsy to me when directly compared to Lojban. ;-)

But most importantly, I kept going just for fun. :-)


co'o

(This is “Good-bye!” in Lojban.)


-- 
Wuzzy
XMPP: Wuzzy2@jabber.ccc.de
E-Mail: wuzzy2@mail.ru

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