Re: Lojban's imperfections?

[Chris A Bogart <cbogart@INDRA.COM>]

On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Christian Richard wrote:
> Hullo!

Hi!

Some of these questions I don't know about; others I'm not very
interested in, so I'll let others answer...

> 1.  In Lojban, why is the first argument of a predicate put before that
> predicate?

All the arguments can be put before the predicate, or some of them, or
all but the first.  The first argument can't go after the predicate
so that pred-arg-arg-arg can have a special meanining (observatives).

The fact that lojban is often written with exactly one argument before
the predicate is probably English bias, but it's not necessary.  Feel
free to put the predicate last if you want!

> 3. There seems to be much talk about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how
> Lojban can be a way to test it.  Exactly how is it intended to be tested?
> Has there been any tests and results yet?  Or is this test of the
> Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis simply talk and no real thing done yet?

I think it's pretty much "simply talk" at this point -- it requires
someone being pretty fluent, perhaps even having Lojban as a first
language, and that isn't going to happen anytime soon.  I don't know
if there are any concrete plans for experiments along these lines --
I'm not sure how it could be tested.  Personally, I consider it
a subjective experiment -- I'll see if I think I think differently
after I'm fluent.  But that's certainly not a scientific test.

> 5. Lojban seems to emphasise morphological and syntactic ambiguity, and
> the language seems to try hard to be the less ambiguous possible.
> However, Lojban allows the compounding of roots to form compound
> words that by themselves could mean any number of things.  Is this
> intentional?  Why is this allowed in a supposedly unambiguous language?

Two reasons I can think of:

  - Perfect unambiguity is very difficult, perhaps impossible.  Never
    mind compounding of roots -- the exact meanings of the roots them-
    selves is ambiguous.  The best we can do is get rid of syntactic
    ambiguity, and reduce semantic ambiguity as much as we can
  - A real human language must provide for the sorts of things people
    want to say -- and people sometimes want to say ambiguous things.
    The compounding rules state fairly precisely what about them is
    ambiguous and what is not -- in a sense we're letting people
    decide *precisely* how ambiguous to be.

> 6.  To learn Lojban, I would have to master the order, number, and
> semantics of arguments associated with each predicate.  I have noticed
> that this dependency on order is also very much like the usual order in
> English.  Are there again reasons why this order is not culturally neutral
> and wasn't originally determined randomly instead of matching the natural
> order the arguments would have in English?  Or is this a direct import
> from the predicate calculus?

I think an attempt was made to place the arguments in order of
importance -- but this task was performed by an English speaker.
I think it was done well enough, but perhaps a native speaker of
something very different from English would see the bias more
strongly than I can.

> 7. Is Lojban intended to be a language learnt and usable by humans?  If
> so, how can it have such strict velency rules that depend only on physical
> order for identifying the role of each argument.  Wouldn't this make
> Lojban more of a computer language than a natural language?

Your statement sounds reasonable, but what evidence do you have to
support the idea that this method isn't learnable?  This is the sort
of thing where Lojban can be a useful experiment -- if people can't
learn to do this, then we've learned something about how the brain
processes language.

Personally I think people will be able to learn this -- my only
evidence being that it's easier for me now than I thought it would
be when I started.  But I'm far from fluent yet, so it's hard to
say.

> I would be interested in knowing how successful you were in having complex
> conversations in Lojban during your annual Lojban-parties.
> Is there anybody in the world fluent in Lojban, speaking fast and
> naturally, just as an Anglophone speaks English?

Some of us can get by in conversation; probably Nick is the closest
thing to fluent that we have.

The problem is we're too spread out geographically for a real
speakers community to form.  There have been some fairly
protracted Lojban conversations, but once a year just doesn't cut
it for gaining fluency.

Another problem is that it just isn't practical to spend gobs of
time learning Lojban right now, so it's hard to put the time into
it.  I've really slacked off since this spring when I got a full-
time job.

Anyone in Colorado want to get together once a week for birje joi
nuncasnu?

co'o mi'e kris