response to Dave Matuszek

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

I'll try to do this quickly from the comments as they flashed by, so my
apologies Dave if I misunderstood something from my quick read.

1. I was stating the argument from the linguist's point of view, which I have
admittedly pretty much adopted.  But recognize that what I said, even if it is 
a turnoff, is reality.  Linguists will not be much interested unless we can
meet THEIR standards.  A Sapir-Whorf test is a linguistics experiment, and
linguists have to be involved and satisfied that their involvemnet is meaningful.

Now you can say that their definition of language is too limited.  But they are
basically saying that FORTRAN is indeed NOT a human language, does not reflect
human linguistic behavior, but rather computer behavior.  They are interested
in the cognitive processes that go on in our heads in processing language, and
the assumption is that processing a code is NOT the same as processing a
language.  You analyze a code, you understand a language.

I do not say that Esperanto is a code - I said specifically that it is an
early creole.  A language stops being a code when it becomes a developed
pidgin.  But a pidgin still has a community of speakers (and listeners).

2. Which points out that the spekaer/listener interaction is not orthogonal
to my claim.  The moment you have speakers and listeners you have the start
of a community.

3. Yes you can say that all meanings of symbols in a symbol system is arbitrary.
But in a code, the assignments are apriori arbitrary.  In a language the
meaning of the words is inferred by the listewner, and the fact that such 
inference is even possible means that FOR THE LISTENER the meanings are no l
longer arbitrary, but are guessable from some experience in using the language
and the specific context.

In a code, you don'e interpet by guessing the meanings (unless you are a
cryptographer), you just substitute from your knowledge of the apriori
schema.  In a human language you don;t know the entire schema so you have
to make an intelligent guess.  It is this use of intelligence to understand
that makes atural language processing meaningfully difficult.

4. I am not hostile to General Semantics, though I admit to knowing not that
much about it.  It is merely one theory among many, and I am doing my best to
make the language design independent of various metaphysical theories, and
especially those that linguists are prone to dismiss.

If the language is going to ever have practical application (i.e. if it is
ever to be a real langauge), we have to sell the language to one of the
three 1) an international language community 2) the artificial  intelligence
mnatural language processing community 3) the linguistic communtiy.

1) is downplayed so as to avoid competing with Esperanto.  2&3 are highly 
interdependent in that many NLP people are trained as linguists.

(There are some lesser possibilities, like using Lojban as an education tool,
that could gain us practical application.  But almost all applications for
the language require at least some degree of acceptance by linguists.)

5. Another way to look at the code/language distinction is the difference
between objective and subjective meaning.  In languages, we determine meanings
subjectively because we cannot determine them objectively.  And I am claiming
that if we could do so, we would not have a language.  You can have lots of
clues to aid a person in learning the subjective process, like our unambiguous
resolution of rafsi in lujvo compounds, but the process is still subjective
because each of us has differing experiences on which we base our understandings
of meaning.

Recognizing that your listeners will undertsnd your words differently than you]
do as you speak them is basic to language use, although probably totally 
subconscious when we speak our native language.  It is, however obvious when
we learn a foreign language, that the natives we speak to interpret the words
somewhat differently than we express them.

But if we talk in a code - say pig latin - to be rudimentary, we do not
undersatnd the words as having meanings in themselves - we do not "attribute"
meanings to words.  Instead we just assign the English equivalent of each
pig-laitin word, and then 'undersatnd' the English.

What I am claiming is that it takes a community before you have the critical
mass necessary to have words mean NOT what you want them to mean, but rather
what the communal thinking has evolved them to mean, at which point you
are a recipient of language, not an inventor of it.

lojbba