Re: What's going on here?

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

On Sat, 25 Oct 1997, Chris Bogart wrote:

> 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.

Incidentally, I'm not entirely convinced that the "ser"/"estar"
distinction is especially objective. "Estar" means to be in a place, or to
be in a certain condition, and whatever other uses it has, and then "ser"
seems to be for all the other senses of being. But I don't think that the
kinds of being picked out by "estar" have any distinct metaphysical
characteristics from the kinds that are picked up by "ser". There's
nothing fundamentally different about the two forms of being; they're just
used linguistically for different cases. If a native Spanish-speaker feels
differently, speak now or forever hold your peace. :)

> 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.

In cases where a concept is especially difficult to express briefly in a
native language, we generally just borrow the word or phrase that
expresses it from the other language. It will be interesting to see if
there are any such Lojbanic phrases that anyone will find useful enough to
quote a lot, or eventually borrow and adapt. This process of
word-borrowing has been going on forever and English must be the king of
borrowing words.

But in terms of actually making the distinction at all, you don't need a
language to do that, you just make the distinction. What a language can do
is find a convenient way of expressing that distinction to others.

Geoff