Subject: RE: [lojban] Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 14:21:50 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Craig wrote:

> >Myself, I am not sure that we won't eventually have Lojban attitudinals
> >that are NOT translatable to other languages.
>
> You mean they aren't already untranslatable? I'm beginning to think the
> heart of the debate about assertions comes from a perception that they can't
> just express a detached feeling of hope on the one hand and that happiness
> doesn't affect the truth value on the other hand - a holdover from English.
> This is why we get questions like 'Right. And what is the non-propositional
> sense of {ai}? "I'm feeling intentuous today"?' which comes from a
> difficulty for English speakers to fathom new ways of describing emotions
> we've felt our whole lives. I still don't get the propositional sense of
> .ui, but I consider that to be my own cultural myopia. So if the fact that
> attitudinals can't be translated is proof of the SWH, then lojban. has
> served its purpose.

I agree. If we think about the emotions we have words for, and try to
create words for them in Lojban that work the same way, we will only
duplicate our English/Western models. But how can we create words for
which we don't yet know the definitions?? One thing we can do is allow
words we understand to be used in strange ways. If those odd ways ever get
exploited by the Lojban babies, we will see that we were trapped by our
imported models.

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