Re: The design of Lojban

[HACKER G N <c9709244@ALINGA.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU>]

On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, Mark Vines wrote:

> > 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.
>
> This IMO is a very, very insightful comment.

Lojban does force certain choices that English doesn't. It forces a choice
between whether you mean "inclusive-" or "exclusive-or" when you wish to
communicate a disjunction; English does not. Lojban forces a choice about
whether to speak specifically/non-veridically or
non-specifically/veridically in a casual reference, where English does
not. Lojban forces a choice about whether or not to include the listener
in the "we" pronoun, and the only group of languages I know of that force
this same choice are the Melanesian languages of Papua New Guinea. Lojban
is also much less tolerant of metaphor than natural languages are. It's
not obvious to me at all that Lojban is a superior method of communication
to English, especially given its appallingly small root vocabulary. And I
don't believe for one second that it has done anything whatsoever to
improve my thinking - but at least it hasn't hindered it!

 >
> > 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.
>
> This IMO is a very, very insightful question.  I don't know
> whether Lojban was intended to raise such barriers.  I think
> that it does raise some barriers while lowering others.

Yes, I agree with you on that.
>
> Do you imagine that you are interested in women?  In music?  In
> logic?  In language?  Not so, according to Lojban grammar.  The
> x1 place of {cinri} must be an _abstraction_.  This raises
> something of a barrier IMO.  And there are other gismu whose
> place structures raise similar barriers.  Don't try to think
> about defending your country, or your property, in Lojban;
> people can't defend anything in Lojban; only events can do
> that, because the x1 place of {bandu} must be an _event_.
>
> Perhaps someone, or some event, would care to defend Lojban
> against this charge?
>
I would imagine that if YOU wanted to defend something in Lojban, you
could just use sumti-raising or a lujvo formed with "-zu'e". You can also
use sumti-raising to be interested in a concrete rather than an
abstraction.

Geoff