Subject: A Lojban CLL?

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 17:20:23 -0400

At 12:32 PM 9/15/02 +0200, Lionel Vidal wrote:
> > CLL I presume you mean. Certainly it would be easier to translate Cowan's
> > prose into Lojban than that of most philosophers, and I think it would be
> > a lot easier than the Lojban-only dictionary
>
>Actually I was not thinking of a litteral translation of Cowan's work

A translation need not be precisely literal, but there is no sense 
reinventing the creative work that went into CLL (structure, examples, 
details that are explained)

> > I should think that we've proven that a long time ago. The problem is not
> > expressivity, but skill of the expressor and understandability on the part
> > of the unskilled reader
>
>If you say that some things could be expressed in lojban but nobody has
>enough skill to say it or to understand it properly,

That is not quite what I said. There are a few people with the skill to 
express it, but probably not without a lot of work, and a somewhat larger 
number who could understand it. But the ones who could understand it would 
be those who already know the grammar, which means that they already 
understand what the material in trying to tell them. An unskilled reader, 
on the other hand, would need to learn the material in order to become 
skilled enough to understand the material. Thus the people most interested 
in reading such a book are the ones who can't read it, and the ones who can 
read it would have the least reason to actually do so.

>And then, to understand the translation properly, I do need a good
>reference grammar work, and here 'good' strongly includes 'non-ambiguous'
>and independent of the subtilities of english,

We don't need good reference grammars of English in order to understand 
English. Why should we need one for Lojban, unless Lojban is in some way 
inferior?

I don't think that, even if such a reference grammar were to exist, that 
many people would be writing and understanding at that standard of skill 
for a long time to come.

>that even natives do not
>always agree on (just read some threads of discussion on the interpretation
>of some glosses of Cowan's work :-)

There are similar discussions about the correct way to look at English, but 
people usually understand English.

>...don't you think then that lojban is the most suited language to be used 
>there?

No. Because the nominal precision of the language would be negated by the 
imprecision with which it is used and understood.

This is not to say that the result would be WORSE than English, it just 
likely would not be better than English, and it would be more difficult to 
read for more people because fewer people are able to read Lojban.

I'm not opposed to writing such a book; I just don't think that many would 
read it.

> > especially since Lojban more than other artificial
> > languages tends to attract people who are not necessarily all that skilled
> > at learning or speaking foreign languages.
>
>I do not buy that one: all the people I read on that list have much more
>language or linguistic sensibilities than the average. I would say that for
>that kind of people, as for most educated people, skill is not really the
>problem to learn a foreign language: motivation and time (often linked
>with motivation) are the keys.

I have plenty of language sensibility, but for all the years I've worked in 
Lojban, I don't come close to thinking in the language, and thus translate 
everything. My understanding is that skilled foreign language users learn 
to think in the target language, and I've never made that jump in any of 
the languages I've tried to learn (I probably came closest with Russian 
because of the near immersion of raising young kids who spoke only Russian 
- for a while I could say that I was fluent in "6-year-old Russian", but I 
still could not carry on a simple conversation with an adult without word 
for word translation which was incredibly slow and painful.)

It is not lack of motivation. Time may be part of the issue. But I think 
the real problem is more the sorts of things that we want to talk about, 
and the level of error we are willing to accept in 
communications. Technical people tend to want to read the book and then 
talk about adult things with adult skill and understanding comparable to 
what they get in their native language, and it doesn't seem that languages 
are learned that way. You need to have a tolerance for mistakes and 
general sloppiness, and a willingness to talk about things a good deal less 
sophisticated than philosophy and linguistics, the sorts of smalltalk 
conversation that builds up conversational fluency. Then the tougher stuff 
is manageable.

> > If we can explain it in English, we can explain it in Lojban. But would
> > anyone bother to understand when they can read and understand it more
> > easily in English.
>
>I am convinced that even for an english native, a well-written technical
>lojban text will be less subject to intrepretations than the same in
>english, considering the complexity of English and its variants.

I don't think we could yet produce something "well-written" in Lojban in 
the sense that it would be clearer than English, until we have people 
thinking in Lojban. Otherwise they are translating their native language 
thoughts which are imprecise into Lojban, and the translation is never more 
clear than the original.

>And then, the interpretations and discussions of a lojban text
>ambiguities will undoubtly benefit much more the whole lojban community
>than the interpretations and discussions of the same text ambiguities
>in english.

That might be true, if people ever read the Lojban text.

-- 
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