Re: The design of Lojban

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

>Date:         Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:15:56 -0400
>From: 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.

I'll not answer most of these comments, mostly because I suspect
better-qualified folks have beaten me to it.  It seems a bit elitist and
overconfident to me to say that Lojban is as unrestrictive as possible, or
as "clearly expressive."  The plan with Lojban was to create a language
based on predicate logic, thus whose biases (if any) would also be based on
predicate logic, a basis not found as explicitly or as well-defined in any
natural language, and see how that affects things.  So in its way, Lojban
DOES introduce its own linguistic bias (I'm not sure it's possible to talk
of a language that doesn't), just one which is well-understood and well
controlled.

>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?

Yes.  Check out the cmavo list.

>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 remember reading articles answering this; I think they made it into the
reference grammar.

>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.

Been suggested (by me, among others).  Personally, I'm in favor of
considering h and ' to be alloglyphs of the same character.  I find ' hard
to read in some settings, particularly handwriting, and h is otherwise
unused and pretty much identical in sound in most people's heads.  There's
also the historical support of selma'o names being written "KOhA" etc. from
the computer parser.  I still sometimes do this.  And Rosta took the call
further, and at least for a while did away with ' entirely, except where
there was the possibility of ambiguity (so he'd sign "coo mie .and.").
That's more than I, myself, would want.  I still hope for the acceptance of
h as a valid alloglyph of '.

~mark