Subject: RE: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 22:06:53 -0400

At 06:46 AM 9/17/01 -0400, Craig wrote:
> >>I'm not quite sure where my beliefs fall. Perhaps "reluctant hardliner" 
> would
> >>describe it. I don't like to see certain words having unclear meanings, 
> but I
> >>also don't like ugliness (it took me a long time to accept {ce'u}, and
> >>{no'axiro} still pains me). Additionally, I respect the baseline, but that
> >>doesn't mean I _like_ the baseline.
>
>Somewhere on the wiki, someone pointed out that respect for the baseline is
>like respect for the law - one respects it without necessarily agreeeing
>with it.

lojbab himself does not entirely agree with the baseline that he 
champions. I merely remember the reactions of people like you when faced 
with "yet another change to the language", which was unending in the JCB 
era. No one EVER learned TLI Loglan to an level much more sophisticated 
than the level you beginners have already reached.

> >I'm also working on getting good at Lojban for another reason: I'm taking a
> >course in school called "History and Structure of Language" (which is 
> basically
> >about linguistics). For a semester project in which the assignment is to
> >research a topic and then give a 45-minute presentation about it, I plan to
> >teach the class a bit of Lojban. High-schoolers might be a tough 
> audience, but
> >at least they're there because they're interested in language. I plan to 
> spend
> >lots of time on cmene in that presentation.
>
> >This implies that I'm another young Lojbanist (mi jbena fi li 1983 pi'e 
> 12 pi'e
> >9), but I try not to draw too much attention to that fact.
>
>So I'm not the only one around here.

As inspiration to you who are young, I should point out that Nick was your 
age when I got him interested in Lojban, and he had said that in many ways 
it determined his ensuing life. He is you, 10 years later.

I also think that talking about Lojban to high schoolers is not impossible 
- after all, you guys understand much of what you read about the 
language. That you don't follow the grad-research level arguments is not 
to say that the language can't be put at a level comprehensible to the 
level of education of the typical high schooler. I'd like to do more of 
this, and indeed one long term goal I would like to see is that "History 
and Structure of Language" or a course of similar name, would become a 
mainstay of high school or even younger grades, and that it would use 
Lojban as a "simpler model" of a language along with examples from a 
variety of natural languages to teach people what language is all about. I 
think that learning to think about language is important to being a good 
communicator in English, as well as in learning foreign languages when you 
can actually make use of them. It is more valuable than studying a foreign 
language that you can't actually use everyday and will likely forget once 
you finish the class (the approach that seems to dominate our American 
schools today leading to people who know a few words in one other language 
but who cannot really speak or learn any foreign language when they need 
it as an adult.

If I had had such a course in high school, my college and later life might 
have been far different. As it was, I was almost 30 before I became active 
in Loglan, and past that age before I realized how little I knew about 
linguistics and languages. This affected not only my Lojban work, but my 
efforts to learn Russian in 1992, when I adopted two young kids from 
Russia, and found that my 3 years of Spanish and 1 year of German were 
utterly useless in that effort. (I eventually achieved near-fluency in 
6-year-old quasi-Russian even though I still cannot converse with an adult 
without a dictionary).

I'm actually wondering if we need a new gismu (WARNING: SARCASM AHEAD):
>"besto" - x1 is an asbestos suit (metaphorically) worn by x2 over e-mail x3,
>disagreed with by x4 for obvious reason x5

Rather, you need an attitudinal indicator, which is probably .ionai, 
.ianai, .ienai .i'anai, or .i'enai in combination with each other and/or 
zo'o or zo'onai, dainai, or ju'onai,and maybe even "le'o"

There is a lot wrapped up in the word "sarcasm" and in the multiple uses to 
which we put that mannerism in English. Lojban, with a much greater 
variety of expressions of attitude is potentially much more communicative 
than English could ever be in this realm. If there is one area I would 
like to see beginners experiment more with, it is the application of 
attitudinals of UI to their Lojban usage, because there more than in the 
logical aspects is where I think Lojban is most likely to show Sapir-Whorf 
effects because it so expands what can be clearly expressed in language 
from what people are familiar with in natlangs.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org