Re: New to Lojban

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

BO> 1) Though lojban is more a linguistic exercise than a tongue intended for
BO> everyday speech, is there a "Conversational Lojban" primer.  You know,
BO> ordering a restaurant, hello, goodbye, "this suit is not clean!"  I for
BO> one would have an easier time grasping the language if it could be applied
BO> to everyday situations.  Might draw others into its study, too.  

Well, I wouldn't call it just a linguistic exercise - sounds too much like
we don't intend that anyone ever actualy USE the thing.  In order to be
useful for linguistics research (at least for the linguists to accept it as
such) it BY DEFINITION has to be used/useful for everyday speech.

We attempted once to come up with a Lojban 'Berlitz phrase book', and I still
have it around somewhere, partially complete.  Basically, it didn;t get done,
for ac ouple of reasons:

1) Many/most of the everyday situaations have never come up in regular speech.
Thus we are inventing usages out of whole cloth.  When there really is a
restaurant where ordering in Lojban is practical, this type of thing will
make more sense - the phrases will at least have some meaning then.
(Actually, what will happen is that people will coin them as needed for
fiction.  I have a brief restaurant scen in one of the textbook lesson
readings.  But when writing specific fiction, you at least have some context
that might help the coining of usages 'as if' you were doing it 'live'.
Dealing with a list of phrase just isn't 'live' enough.

2) the everyday speech situations in natlangs are exactly those where there
is a heavy amount of cultural load.  Think about "How are you?" which is not
really a question, but a greeting, and "You're welcome" which can be
stretched to fit its denotation only with some difficulty.  Because of our
desire to eliminate unnecessary cultural artifacts in our as-yet English-
dominated community, I don't want such usages to 'come down from on high',
but to evolve within the international Lojban community.  Anything I, or the
rest of 'Lojban Central' comes up with is too prone to cultural bias.

Still, we want to come up with this kind of thing, and no doubt there will
eventually be such a phrasebook.  It just is not much of a priority (even
though there are many people like you who would like it.

Ooops.  I left off reason #3:  Lojban hgas a philosophy these days of
"let a thousand flowers bloom".  To make a terse, culture-free language
'interesting', as well as 'real', 'natural', etc., we need to take advantage
of all opportunity to come up with multiple ways to say the same thing,
preferably each with its own contextual basis.  For example, Lojban has
exactly one way to greet someone:"coi", whereas most natural languages have
several.  We want that richness, but not at the expense of 'coining' it.
There are a lot of ways to express a thought; let people find the one that
suits them.

This makes Lojban a little harder to 'study' - there are fewer 'right answers'.
But it makes it more interesting to 'learn', or to 'explore', because you
join the others of us who are truly 'exploring' - trying thinmgs out to see
what works, what seems right.  My efforts at studying foreign languages
(mostly unsuccessful, but I've learned a lot about the process at least)
tells me that what WORKS is to learn a language not by studying phrase books,
but by diving in and trying to internalize thinking in the language by figuring
out how to say things for yourself.  Adults are used to studying subjects 
where all the answers are known and can/should be abale to be looked up in a 
book.  But languages aren't like that - there will never be a list of all the things someone might say or want to say in any language.  I think kids learn
language easier because they don't externalize the  communication process this
way (How 'should' I say this? vs. How am I going to TRY to say this?) they
just
go ahead and say something, and amend it if necessaaary to make it sufficiently
clear so as to communicate.

BO> 2) Lojban seems to be a rather terse language (I like that!).  Do you have
BO> any idea how many syllables it takes to translate an English passage of
BO> say 100 syllables into lojban?  Far prefer lojban to Esperanto, which
BO> seems to me very verbose and exhausting for even the simplest utterances.

Actually, I don't think Lojban is particularly terse, for a couple of reasons
(I got a couple of reasons for everything %^)

1. Almost all Lojban these days is translations, usually from English or
from
ideas originally expressed in English.  Almost always, a translation will
be longer than the original, regardless of the languages, because the source
language will have some things that must be paraphrased in the target
language.  Only rarely in translating (and usually only with the best
translators) does a given source language expression have an obvious and more
terse equivalent in the target language.

2. English and most natlangs have lots of words with multiple meanings.
Lojban tries for only one meaning per word. If you have the same number
of concepts (or density of ideas in the semantics space), then Lojban will
need more varieties of words to express the same range of meanings.
But there is evidence that natlangs are at some optimal level of redundancy
(if abbreviated too much, communication would falter and people would have
to repeat and rephrase more, while if the language is too verbose, people will
tend to find shorter ways to say it in order to save time.)

But if you need more words in the lexicon, and have the same inventory of 
sounds, then the average word will have to be longer, or you will have to
have more multi-word phrases, in order to cover that range of meanings.

3. Being logically explicit and unambiguous, is prone to require more words
than being ambiguous.  (Proof by assertion, but I hope this is intuitive.)
Try "everybody loves somebody" vs.  For every x, there is a y such that x
loves y".

4.  Lojban has lots of little structure words that glue sentences together.
These make for more syllables in the average text (and more words if the
structure words are written separately).  Languages that have declensions
tend to be more terse, since they include the grammar in the very words
themselves.  Languages that have conjugations of verbs often need no personal
pronouns.  Lojban needs the pronouns more often in order to be clear.

Where Lojban might seem terse is where we have not acquired a cultural
veneer of paraphrase and euphemism.  In Lojban, people are "dead" (morsi) they
disn't "pass away", etc.  I excrete(vikmi), not "go to the bathroom".
This may make the language seem more terse than the English equivalent, but
the other areas f the language more than make up for it.

English itself is a particularly terse language as syllable count goes.
When you take an English song, with only a few syllables per line,
and try to fit Lojban words to it, you have to put several words per
beat.  Iambic pentameter is flowery in English, but most Lojban needs that
many syllables in order to martch a rhythm and convey a meaning.

Oh, a couple more reasons here too.

5. Borrowings in Lojban are always longer thanthe natlang word, because we
require a classifier to indicate something of the semantic space being covered
thius adds 2 syllables to each such word.  jargon-laden Lojban will be very
verbose looking.  (Try to come up with a metaphor for "modem" - it actually is
not that hard, but if you don't borrow it, you are prone to
trying
to convey "modulator-demodulator" which in Lojban might be a dozen syllables.

6.  Lojban speakers tend to WANT to be more precise and exact in what they say.
There are cases where something is perfectly clear in a short form, but is
elaborated to make sure that PRECISELY the meaning intended is understood.
People have said that translating meaning-rich English (Nick Nicholas is
reportedly working on Hamlet's Solilioquy) is particularly difficult into 
Lojban, because people aren't happy with vagueness.  (Yet Lojban allows some
vagueness that English does not, such as tenseless eexpression - but these
areas of vagueness tend in English to require little recognizable non-terse
qualities: the -ed ending for past tense; the -s ending for plural, etc. tend
not to require additional syllables.


An excellent question, and a long-winded answer.  I'm posting this to the
list since I am sure it is of general interest.

lojbab