Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:14:03 +0100

Tsali (Arnt Richard Johansen):
> It has been suggested -- among others by the person, whose name escapes
> me, who reviewed _the Complete Lojban Language_ in _Journal of
> Linguistics_ -- that the Lojban prescription may run counter to the
> so-called "linguistic universals". Linguistic universals, in case you
> want to know, are the properties that the Chomskyan school of
> linguistics believe to be common to all languages -- and, in fact,
> hardwired into the design of the human brain.
> 
> Are any of you familiar with these theories? Can you name any universal
> that Lojban violates? Can Lojban be used as a test of whether
> "Mentalese" exists? If the current theory of language acquisition holds
> true, what would the difference be between Lojban as we speak it, and
> Lojban as used by a person who has acquired it as a first language from
> someone who speaks Lojban as we speak it?

Speaking unauthoritatively, I don't think that the Chomskyan school is
currently able to state universals that delimit the set of possible
natural languages.

However, language typologists have compiled statistical universals, and
have a fair sense of what is usual/rare/unattested/inconceivable in
natural languages. So I do think it is possible to take the fruits of
a broader body of linguistic scholarship and say which bits of Lojban
are relatively more and less natural.

Off the top of my head, here's an inexhaustive list of what I think 
unnatural:

* the syntactic structure assigned by the yacc grammar
* terminators
* pretty much everything to do with the morphology and phonotactics
* the attitudinals' systematicity and compositionality
* MEX
* the complexity of Tense, and aspects of its semantics
* semantically arbitrary place structures
* SE
* SI/SA/SU
* go'e go'o nei no'a
* LAU

I don't think Lojban will test whether a putatative universal is 
genuine, because these universals pertain to natural language, and
Lojban won't be a natural language until it is acquired as a
native tongue. However, in areas of great unnaturalness and
moderate to great complexity, the fluency gained by Lojban
speakers will show, I believe, the extent to which 'general
intelligence', or more specifically, the skill of handling complex
patterns and algorithms in real time, can get people by. This
will then give us an idea of how much of our language faculty
is language-specific and how much is a product of more general
cognitive abilities.

--And.