Re: lojban imperfections?

["John E. Clifford" <Pycyn@AOL.COM>]

coi kris
To take your last question first, I don't think there is anyone who is
native-
fluent in Lojban.  There are several people -- you will hear from some of
them as soon as you put your first bit of Lojban on this list -- who are
pretty good, though.  There have been some moderately lengthy and not
very halting, conversations at meetings and over the telephone as well as
computer chats (which may or may not count).  Transcripts of some of
these are around somewhere.  They do suggest that speakers rarely use all
the places of  predicates with more than four or five places and even then -
- in fact after about three -- are liable to throw in a "preposition" just to
be
on the safe side.  Pushing the limits of  the 5+/- 2 and right branching
rules
is one possible part of a Sapir-Whorf test (or an IQ-enhancer for that
matter).  But, yes, Lojban is meant to be human-speakable and actually is
on occasion (exactly what is required for a proof that it is is not clear).

6.  Order is tricky.  Two factors, at least, have been involved.  One is a
(necessarily informal) survey of the relevant orders in typical sentences in
major languages (and minor when they were interesting and available).
This showed that, for example, agents preceded patients and recipients
pretty regularly and the reverse order was pretty rare, so SO got fixed.
There are also pretty general cross-language order patterns for various
kinds of additional terms, though they are not as clear cut.  The second
factor was an (possibly subjective -- though I think therehave been some
tests) judgement about the centrality of various arguments in the
predication, which ones need to be specified most often.  This, of course,
starts with the question of what places to specify and then goes on to their
order -- less central are later (since they can more often be dropped
without loss of intended information).  English is a fairly typical language
in both these respects, but not the only one consulted.  And notice that all
orders are legal in Lojban and require only minor tricks to produce.

5.  Actually, all the roots (gismu -- we use this as a technical term, so as
not to carry over any freight from other fields that may not fit) are
unambiguous *in Lojban*, but get translated various ways in various
contexts in English or whatever (the first native speaker will probably the
first person who really senses this fact).  Lujvo are, however, open to
wider interpretation (as indeed are tanru), only their syntax, not their
semantics (nor pragmatic neither), is fixed by their structures.  So, again,
it is a human language, since ambiguity is one of the essential of human
language -- art, if nothing else(and law, of course). But there is no
*syntactic* ambiguity, so that parsing by machine is possible, even if
translation/interpretation is not.

4.  Well, those most popular langauges represent a rather wide array of
cultures, about as wide as you can get in the growing homogenized world.
Also, no gism are taken from any of these langauges, they are merely
meant to be accessible to them (contrast Esperanto, for example, or some
of the even worse Interglossae).  More importantly, however, the physical
shape of the words is relatively unimportant from a cultural point of view,
what is important is how each fits into the rest of the vocabulary and into
the sentence structure.  And then no Lojban gismu is like any word in any
other language (try a fairly literal -- by cognates or by dictionary --
translation from English into Lojban; the Lojban  never means much
nearer than shouting distance of the English, as we all learn about week
three).  Here as (did I mention it back then?) in matters of word order and
the like, Lojban tends to be neutral by including as many variations as
possible, without significantly favoring any.

3.  No, the S-W test has never been done, not even finally designed, so far
as I know.  The design must wait for the finished language to calculate
where the most likely effects are to be found and then the test devised to
hit those points especially.  All plans I have ever seen also require a cadre
of  several dozen fluent Lojban speakers and a big grant.  Neither of these
is in the offing.

2.  Logicians have been involved in the design of Lojban (and other
Loglans) since the start.  We (I am one, on the project since '76) do know
the standard terms and also the theoretical freight they carry.  So we use
new terms, which we can load up the way we want to.  There are not that
many differences in some cases, but rather enormous ones in others (no
logical or linguistic expression in the NP class catches what all is involved
in a sumti, for example).  Ditto linguists (me again, for one).

1.  A mess of factors for SVO (but notice that VSO and SOV are usually
equally as good and without any extra flags-- the three most common
forms, over 90% of base forms worldwide, it is said).  1) It is the most
common order worldwide (not theoretically significant, just handy for
learning -- like the gismu forms).  2) In logic, while it is not the usual
form, it is a common form for making non-standard points (negative
empty universe claims, for example) and it is nice to have that ability in
Lojban, since it saves a bit in the syntax (but is not much used anymore).
3) Again in syntax, SVO save a bit on various non-declarative forms like
imperatives and observatives, though not so much in the current language
as in earlier versions.  Finally, word order is not thought to be culturally
significant in the Sapir-Whorf sense.

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