Subject: [lojban] Re-evaluation + an idea - Was: A parable

From: Jim Peters <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 00:35:52 +0100

Nick Nicholas wrote:
> (1) "I am thinking," said Confucius, "that I am wise."
> "Are you wise about strategy? About philosophy? About love? About the ways
> of the butterfly?"
> ...

Well, a parable is to reflect on yourself and learn something, right ?
(Apart from the Lojban which I don't understand at all well yet.)
Something about being or acting wise in some abstract sense but not
doing anything useful.

Maybe I should come as clean as I can. I threw the spanner in
regarding the defined meanings of Lojban words being non-abstract, as
a Sapir-Whorf thing. However, I would be in no position to help with
defining new meanings because whilst I can find lots of more abstract
ways to look at everything, I'm not confident that I could come up
with a set that would work well together as a system.

It's completely clear to me that the Western scientific world-view is
incomplete, and is just one world-view amongst many [*1]. There are
many other world-views I've worked with, or come across, or wandered
through, or got a hint of, but I've always learnt just what I've
needed to know to get whatever job I was doing done - I don't know any
of them well enough to build a complete system of understanding.

So I'm like a wanderer coming back with strange stories, lots of bits
and bobs of experiences and a few skills, but not much in the way of
the kind of systematic information that might be required to help
build or improve a language.

If the approach so far with Lojban has been to base everything on a
physical-scientific world-view, then I'm in absolutely no position to
argue with that. In any case, it does have the advantage that all
Westerners will understand it, and science has been spreading pretty
well to other places. Maybe this could be seen as the chosen "tone"
of the language.

Also, I've learnt about (and come to experience) many of these other
world-views from books written in English. So even though the English
language had often never met that world-view before in its whole
history, it could still be used to explain it and convey a sense of
it.

So this means it should all work out fine, then, probably, and it
appears I was just stirring things up for no reason ...

- - -

The other thing about this abstractness that reflects on me is that at
a concrete physical-world level, I'm not terribly productive, although
I'm working on it. So no use in counting on me actually doing
anything useful.

- - -

The other thing, whilst I'm coming clean, is that I had this idea that
might be useful, I'm not sure. I believe in it, but that doesn't
necessarily mean anything in the big world out there.

It goes like this: When you learn your native tongue, you learn it by
example, not through rules and grammar or whatever. Somehow you
`know' the rules without knowing them on a conscious level. The
correct way of saying things just `sounds right', and an incorrect way
`sounds wrong'. Some subconscious part of you is taking care of
grammar rules and word-meanings automatically. This sounds like a
*Good Thing*, because I don't like thinking too much unnecessarily,
and I'd be very happy to have some other part of my brain take care of
all this complication for me. Really I'd like to think about what I'm
saying, not about the grammar.

So, how does this come about ? Well, the child just hears a lot of
examples. Phrases that contain a mixture of known-words and
unknown-words have the known bits somehow `lit up', and the other bits
somehow `blurry'. The mind tries to guess what the other bits might
mean ("glorking by context" - it came up just now). After hearing an
unknown word enough times, the guessed meanings will have come
together into some kind of a pattern, and that becomes the approximate
meaning of the previously-unknown word, becoming more clear as more
examples reinforce that.

Now, how about this as an approach - we define the language purely
through examples. It's already come up just now - someone was talking
about "soi vo'a", and how having just that one example meant that many
people only saw it one way.

What I'm really thinking about is emulating the native learning
experience in some kind of accelerated way. Let's say we use some
kind of flash-card program to help people learn phrases - in both
directions, so they learn to say a Lojban phrase given the English
phrase, and the other way around. The phrases (or batches of phrases)
are ordered to help them a bit, but not entirely - we still throw in
phrases that introduce new cmavo, say, without really explaining what
is going on. The mind will do all its pattern-matching stuff to help
make learning these phrases easier - like starting to recognise words,
and provisionally associate words with meanings, and so on.

How many examples of a particular word or construction do you think
would be required to `program' the automatic language parts of the
brain correctly ? Obviously more than one to avoid the "soi vo'a"
situation.

It would also be good to put as much varied stuff into each example
phrase as possible. Having ten near-identical examples to illustrate
some point is not the way it happens naturally. I mean, that might be
useful in a logical discussion of the grammar, but not in what I have
in mind. I'm trying to sneak all the rules in via the back door, and
the brain has to be kept interested with lots of real-life variety.

If this method works (i.e. it is possible to learn the rules without
consciously learning them), then it is also very easy to get right.
The learner can only base their subconscious knowledge of the language
on the examples that have been given, so if all the language
`authority figures' can agree that all the phrases are `good Lojban',
then we can't go wrong.

If a learner has learnt this way, without consciously learning any
grammar, then we have our first natural speaker, don't you think ?

I don't know how big a task this might be - how many phrases are
required to completely define all the words and constructions to the
depth that you'd all like them to be defined. Maybe it's an awful
lot, so maybe this isn't actually feasible in practice.

Still, I think that shifting to the point of reference of having to
define the language purely by example (for our example `natural'
learner) may be a useful way of re-evaluating things sometimes.

That's it -

Jim

- - -

[*1: Justification: Working with healing, I know that there are many
systems to help understand and resolve illness, and all of the ones I
know do indeed work, in their own ways. Although there are some
common themes that occur, in several cases one world-view will say
completely the opposite of another. So you can't make a bigger better
world-view that actually works by merging them. This doesn't make any
sense, but this is my experience. You can either look at it from one
frame of reference or the other, but not both at the same time. (That
doesn't stop you using two treatments at the same time, just that you
often can't understand both of them simultaneously). It's something
like switching between polar and cartesian coordinates.

Some world-views are good for one thing, some for another - looking at
a problem from one world-view might show a quick any easy route to a
solution (which indeed works), whereas another world-view might
suggest a solution that would take ages. For the next problem it
might be other way around. For example, crudely - Western medicine:
chop it out, or take this drug, Chinese medicine: balance energy flow,
or bring out bad energy, Dianetics: re-experience the past painful
event causing the problem, Reiki: let healing energy flow and allow
changes to happen, Recapitulation: pull my energy back to me + return
other's energy to them, and so on ... ]

-- 
Jim Peters (_)/=\~/_(_) Uazú
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jim@ (_) /=\ ~/_ (_) www.
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