Study vs. Use (was: Elision, or: Nick rides again in jbonai)

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> Date:  Fri, 12 Apr 91 02:02:09 -0400
> To:  lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com
> From:  Arthur Hyun <ash@rpi.edu>
> Subject:  Re: Elision, or: Nick rides again in jbonai 
   
* * *
>   My primary interest in lojban is the study of the structure and
> the syntax of it, not in learning to speak to anyone with it.  I am
> therefore relatively unconcerned with gaining any more than a very
> casual familiarity with the vocabulary, and I feel that such a familiarity
> will come as I try to express myself in it.  

That was my experience with Old Loglan.  I was attracted by the
regularity of the grammar, but I found that I could not appreciate the
structure and syntax of the language until I had used it extensively. 
To do that, I had to learn the vocabulary, and (surprisingly)
competence in the vocabulary and the grammar came at about the same
time.  As a learning exercise, I decided to translate a fairly long
article from English to Loglan, and pc will remember the discussions
we had over how to make various items work in the real world, rather
than as abstract specifications of syntax and semantics.  

> Furthermore, those things
> I would try to express are things that English is ill-suited for.  In
> order to press my understanding of the syntax of lojban, and therein
> the semantic ramifications, I *must* atempt to use lojban to express
> non-English, or, things that I would otherwise find difficulty in 
> expressing in English.  If this is not possible, I would find it a 
> failing of lojban.  

In analogy, remember the theorem that any computable function can be
computed by a universal Turing machine ... if you're willing to wait!
It's [probably] possible to express literally anything expressible
using English, even though the results are long and hard to understand.
For many examples see your tax forms and instructions.  

Having learned Loglan, I have replaced my English grammar and I
normally organize all language input into predicate logic.  This lets
me confidently interpret the incoming junk, which others do shakily. 
For example, soon after learning Loglan I was with a friend at a store
and he asked the salesman a long, convoluted question with several
negations and some sumti in an odd order, and I parsed it on the fly
and recognized that the salesman would interpret it completely
backward.  So I opened my mouth with a normalized form, and the
salesman understood and gave my friend his answer.  This is the kind of
thing I get out of Loglan, and I could not have done it before.  (The
same thing would work equally well with Lojban, and many aspects of
Lojban are improved over Old Loglan.)

James F. Carter        (213) 825-2897
UCLA-Mathnet;  6221 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA  90024-1555
Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu            BITNET: jimc%math.ucla.edu@INTERBIT
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