The design of Lojban

[Andrew Sieber <absieber@eos.ncsu.edu>]

Since Lojban is based on Loglan which was designed as a mechanism for
testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which claims, basically, that people
are limited in thought by the language in which they think, it's natural
to assume that Lojban is as clearly expressive as possible, so as to
remove restrictions imposed by most natural languages and see what
happens when people begin to _think_ in Lojban.  However, an equally
valid way of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would be to put some
odd, obscure restrictions in the language and see what effect they have
on people's thought processes.  I have been under the assumption (and
have assumed that everybody else was also under the assumption) that
Lojban tests the hypothesis only by lowering existing thought barriers
in natural languages, not by raising new barriers, and so far I haven't
seen any reason to change that assumption.  However, I'm throwing this
out as food for thought, and am curious if anybody thinks/knows that my
assumption is false.

Also, some specifics of Lojban:
In English, "or" can mean either inclusive-or (and/or) or exclusive-or
(either-or).  Is there an unambiguous separation of the two
interpretations in Lojban?
In English, relationships are represented by (or are at least ambiguous
with) ownership.  "My sister's husband" implies that my sister owns her
husband, and also that I own my sister.  In Lojban is there a way to
make references to relationship without implying ownership?
I assume that Lojban has gender-neutral "pronouns."  Does it also have
gender-specific ones, or must gender be specified only by using a
gender-neutral one and then using a separate, explicit modifier to
specify gender?
I found this paragragh in the electronic version of the reference
grammar, chapter 18:
"Lojban has digits for representing bases up to 16, because 16 is a base
often used in computer applications. In English, it is customary to use
the letters A-F as the base 16 digits equivalent to the numbers ten
through fifteen. In Lojban, this ambiguity is avoided."
That's fine and good for me, since I naturally think in decimal and also
use hexadecimal fairly often, and Lojban allows for both of these.
However, how are we ever to convince the Eskimos of Greenland to learn
Lojban?  They use base 20.  (We can ignore the Babylonians, who used
base 60, because they're all dead.  No hard feelings.)  Also, are there
any _symbols_ beyond 0, 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 ?

On another topic:  there has been some discussion lately about using
Dvorak keyboards with the ' and h keys swapped.  I've got a simpler
solution, albeit one that will probably make some people on this list
mad, annoyed, or both, but I'll throw the idea out for consideration
anyway:  why not simply use the symbol h as being synonymous with the
symbol ' and thus type comfortably using an unmodified Dvorak keyboard?
For people who want to publish texts which they have created in this
manner, all they have to do is use the find/replace feature of their
text editors to change all occurences of h to ' and then their
mischievous alphabet-molesting habits will never be noticed.

--Andrew
absieber@eos.ncsu.edu