(ethno?)centricity (was: Re: The culture gismu)

[cbmvax!uunet!gnu.ai.mit.edu!grackle!bob]

     The point is that if anyone wishes to maintain the pretense of
   lojban being "culturally neutral", then *every culture* is going
   to have to be considered the same.  

The consequence does not follow from the `if' clause.   The predicate
"culturally neutral" has several places so far unexpressed.

  * by standards:    in this case, standards of mostly middle-class,
                     American developers, sufficient to meet what they
                     think are the needs of enough lojban speakers and
                     experimenters for Lojban to meet the purposes
                     of the language

  * to extent:       as best the developers can, particularly with
                     reference to Zipfian and other practical concerns


      whoever
   has to judge what is "important" or less so WILL have a bias.

Yes, indeed.  So therefore, whoever judges what to include is
obligated to do the best she can.  Since there is little desire to
give everyone his own gismu, the question is "to whom to give gismu?"
If the selected gismu turn out to be sufficient for enough of those
who are experimenting with and speaking Lojban, then the selection
will have been OK.

Of course, the decision is not easy; to me, the best beginning is to
use three criteria: population, wealth/power, frequency of occurence
in the kinds of speech the language developers anticipate for lojban.
These criteria are obviously unfair, and they have a bias; but enough
Lojban speakers may be sufficiently satisfied by them for Lojban to
succeed.


   Therefore, either give up trying to claim "neutrality" or treat
   them all the same. 

This statement is a misunderstanding of what neutrality is about.
Neutralityw is not and cannot be absolute.  Consider as an analogy,
Swedish neutrality during WWII.  At the beginning of the war, when it
appeared that Germany would become the hegemonic power in Europe,
Sweden cooperated more with Germany than with the Allies.  (Remember:
the invasion of Norway was designed to protect shipments of Swedish
iron ore in coastal freighters; very likely, the Swedish mining
regions would have been occupied by the Germans if the Swedes had not
cooperated.)  When the Allied coalition was seen to be winning,
Sweden cooperated more with it, permitting, for example, people such
as Niels Bohr to be flown out of Sweden by the British.

Similarly, lojban cannot be absolutely neutral, neither as a practical
matter nor as a matter of being able to define what `absolute
neutrality' means.  (Obviously, to me at least, `treating them all the
same' is NOT neutral, but is very biased; is that not apparent to you?)

Lojban has several goals relating to cultural neutrality:

  * to serve as a vehicle for intercultural experiments; 

    for lojban to be useful, this means that the undesired influences
    of lojban should both be small enough for the experiments and be
    less than the undesired influences of alternative vehicles, such
    as Urdu or Esperanto.

    if you are testing some group whose culture lacks a gismu, perhaps
    you would invent a nonce gismu; not all five-letter forms are
    currently used, just as not all shorter forms are assigned cmavo

  * to serve as an international language;

    for lojban to be useful, this means that enough people must not be
    overly offended by lojban's biases

  * to serve as a test for `logical language'; 

    this means that lojban must be biased towards logic in some way,
    which biases it against languages such as English.

Another way to tackle the issue is to turn my questions around:

  * Is the current design of lojban too culture bound for experiments
    relating to tense in grammar to succeed? 

  * Is the current design of lojban too culture bound for speakers in
    Asia, Africa, and Europe to accept?  (One possibility is that
    Lojban's logical bias may be more significant than its other
    biases.)


    Robert J. Chassell               bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu
    Rattlesnake Mountain Road        (413) 298-4725 or (617) 253-8568 or
    Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA   (617) 876-3296 (for messages)