Re: What's going on here?

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

On Fri, 24 Oct 1997, Andrew Sieber wrote:
> currently know English, and (possibly with some difficulty) I can
> express anything I want.  It might be awkward, but I can express it.
> The whole point behind wanting to learn Lojban is that expressions will
> be easier and more logical.  If the language doesn't do this, then it
> has no advantage over English.  What's going on here?

Suppose you found a group of English speakers who were interested in
learning Spanish because they thought that grasping the difference between
"ser" and "estar" (two different flavors of "to be") would be an
interesting experience, open their minds, have Sapir-Whorf effects,
whatever.  To native Spanish speakers the distinction comes naturally, but
English-speaking students can study it for years and still get it wrong
sometimes.

Now imagine how much harder it would be if there weren't actually any
native Spanish speakers or definitive Spanish texts to look at; the
distinction was purely theoretical, and the students had to not only
"acquire" the distinction in the language-learning part of their brain,
but invent and refine the distinction intellectually as they went along to
provide a standard for their language abilities to adhere to.

The result would be far more valuable, because, without native Spanish
speakers, they'd be the first people in the world to gain an intuitive
grasp of this interesting distinction.  But it would be damn difficult
without a half a billion Spanish speakers available to try to explain it
to them and provide examples.

In short, I speculate that Lojban does have the potential to expand one's
mind, but it's not a magic pill that you take and suddenly become smarter;
it will take years of work, and any benefits will be pretty subjective
since we'll have learned something that almost by definition we won't be
able to easily explain to the rest of society.

Chris