Ken Miner comments on Lojban on sci.lang

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Ken Miner writes on sci.lang
>However these are not among the linguistic universals that are
>presently crucial to Linguistics in its attempt to define the notion
>"human language" and so we must wait to see whether human children can
>acquire Lojban (roughly, spoken symbolic logic).

I suspect that you portray us rather poorly in labelling Loglan and
Lojban as "spoken symbolic logic".  The symbolic logic aspects of the
language have shown little promise in dominating the language, either in
its learning or its usage.  The predicate language aspect is far more
dominant, supported by the absence of parts of speech categorization of
any of the content words, and the combinatorial compounding power of
Lojban tanru, which are inherently metaphorical (semantically ambiguous,
but not figurative) rather than logical.  And I think the emotional
attitudinal system, if acquired natively by a new generation will most
immediately show differences in the thinking of its speakers.

Any significant effects from the LOGIC aspects of the language will
almost certainly wait for a later generation of speaker, one who has
been taught the language by other speakers who are themselves
comfortable enough with the logical theory embedded in the language to
use it enough for those usages to serve as models.  As it is, the most
skilled Lojbanists tend to treat the logical aspects as toys to be
analyzed and played with rather than internalized.  The attitudinals on
the other hand are the first to be internalized (and I notice in my
Russian native kids that attitudinal-like usages of English are the
first things they have acquired, too).  As Nick Nicholas observed in our
international phone call reported on Lojban List, for a limited subset
of Lojban attitudinals I have internalized them and indeed use them
before English (and Russian) equivalents in some circumstances.  If I
were even somewhat more fluent in Lojban, I suspect that my English
understandability would be seriously affected by Lojbanisms thrown in
subconsciously.  (I'm not all that sure that effects not too detrimental
to understanding haven't happened already - I know that the way I write
and talk has changed since I worked on the project, but not in a
particularly obvious way - I suspect that analysis would show it to be
based on the tanru effect.)

lojbab