Subject: Re: [lojban] A Lojban CLL?

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 22:00:38 +0200

Robert LeChevalier:
> 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.

Not really: it is not because I can read and understand something that I
already know that thing. Otherwise any teaching reference work would
be plain useless. More specifically, the level of language used in a grammar
work could be simple enough to be understood and yet could explain the use
and subtilities of a much higher level of that language: that is in a way
the very purpose of any grammar book.

> 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.

But I have never thought that a lojban CLL would be for beginners! The need
for a reference work comes later, when your mastering of the language allow
you to more or less communicate and you want to, say, access some literature
work or improve your skill.

> 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?

Of course you need some! There are plenty in libraries :-) Again these will
not be needed for basic communication, but very soon after, if you really
want proficiency and understanding of the corpus of your language.

> 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.

Yes, that may be. But I was thinking of the next reference grammar after
the the 'frozen period': I hope by then the standard of skill to be much
higher :-)

There is also a real practical advantage to have the next CLL written in
Lojban: if you want to attract non-english speakers (or not proficient
enough in English to read the grammar), you will have to translate the
CLL in whatever target languages so that everyone could access
a reference. But then it is much more easy and less error prone
to translate lojban learning methods (such as Nick and Robin's excellent
lessons), where adaptations and specific analogies with the target language
could be done to ease the learning, in something complete enough
to access and understand the reference grammar written in Lojban.
And besides, it will be much more easy for the LLG to track only version of
a text in following the language evolutions.
That is one of the things that worked with EO: you can follow elementary
courses in EO in many languages, and then with a little help of
a dictionary, you can read the PAG, the reference grammar in EO,
and from that point understand, at least theorically, ALL the EO corpus.

> 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.

This seems to imply that you expect mostly English speaking people to
be interested in lojban, which may be true now, but as far as I recall is
something you wanted to be changed in another discussion. A reference
work on lojban grammar with some normative objective should
be accessible by anyone with some lojban skill, whatever the other
languages he/she can read.

> 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.)

I agree that no grammar book alone will make you 'think' in a foreign
language, but that was not the purpose the current CLL and will not
be the purpose of the next one, if any.

mu'omi'e lioNEL