Subject: Ideas on Language.

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 21:48:58 -0400 (EDT)

I was talking to a friend of mine about Lojban. She is getting a PhD 
specializing in language acquisition, I believe. She notes that in
almost every language, when parents are teaching their children they
structure the sentences with the most important word at the very end, to
improve recognition of that word. I'm not sure how this works in English
since our word order has ossified in the past several centuries.

***

After years of interrogating bilingual friends of mine for Sapir-Whorf
effects, I finally found somebody who was not coy about it! A friend of
mine, not the one mentioned above, is from Japan and says that Japanese is
very abstract and not suited to mathematical discussion, while English is
very precise and lends itself to math. She described Japanese as being
right-brain and English as being left.

***

A caller on NPR today who works in cross-cultural consulting, said while
talking to Pico Iyer that US English is about the most direct language on
the Earth. He said this in contrast to Japanese as he was discussing the
teaching of Japanese culture to Americans. I think Lojban is much more
direct and explicit than US English. This does not mean that I think
vagueness is impossible or difficult -- only that intentional obfuscation
for politeness is never invoked.

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