Copyright, 1988-1991, by the Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA Phone (703) 385-0273 lojbab@lojban.org All rights reserved. Permission to copy granted subject to your verification that this is the latest version of this document, that your distribution be for the promotion of Lojban, that there is no charge for the product, and that this copyright notice is included intact in the copy. This file contains discussions on 'Why Lojban', including JCB's perspective on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Material was written in 1988. From ju'i lobypli #6 - 8/1988 What Hath JCB Wrought? What has JCB said his purposes for the language are (or were)? By my understanding, JCB's original purpose for the language was solely to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Several of the following contributors will give their interpretations of this goal; I am trying to convey JCB's sense of it. The first problem is to identify the hypothesis. It has been phrased several different ways, which is one of the problems. There are extreme versions, such as 'if you don't have a word for war, people won't ever think of fighting any'. Nice idea, but it seems unlikely. This is NOT a version of Sapir-Whorf that has any relation to Lojban. JCB's formulation is key to understanding what his intent for the language was. I quote his version: "the structure of language determines the boundaries of human thought" (L1, pg. 1, all quotes hereafter are also from the first chapter of L1). A concept that is more difficult to formulate in a language, will be used less, or not at all. The relationship with Zipf's Law, discussed above under lujvo, should be apparent. The boundaries of human thought are not necessarily fixed. Sapir-Whorf is dealing with cultural phenomena, and not with individuals. An individual may transverse the normal cultural bounds, and see new ideas, and may even be able to rephrase them in terms the rest of the culture can understand. But Sapir-Whorf says that the culture, as a whole, will tend to pattern its philosophy and modes of thought around its language. According to JCB, the "Whorf hypothesis is essentially a negative one: language limits thought". JCB's plan was to attempt to build a language tool that would have the major features of natural languages, but would have some strong warping in its structure that was deviant from all other natural languages. This warping would attempt to take normal structures that presumably set limits on thought, and "push them outward in some predictable dimension". His language tool would be an extreme case, not a "typical language", but "a severely atypical one", in order to enable any 'Whorfian effects' to be more easily seen. He attempted to put "decisive but non-essential differences" into the language; he still needed the language to be speakable. I believe JCB's original goal was not to build the full language we are completing today. He speaks of trying to "import ... a human language into the laboratory" by "reduce(ing) its scale". Certainly, for the first 10 years of its existence, the language was only the nucleus of what it is today. In 1960, there were only a few hundred words, but JCB was already trying to teach the language, and was promising a dictionary and grammar 'shortly'. The structural extreme he chose was to model the grammar on the well-understood structures of symbolic logic. There are no natural languages based on a predicate grammar, yet logicians are skilled at analyzing the structural relationships between natural language and formal logic. If you've taken a logic or philosophy class, you probably have experienced this. Loglan/Lojban is 'logical' only in this limited sense, according to JCB. It "purport(s) to facilitate certain limited kinds of thought" - those based on logical transformations. The language was not meant to be a "deductive system" since it isn't wholly self-consistent, nor "reasonable", nor "self-evident". The essential logical concepts that he imported into the language were (abbreviating somewhat) the functional calculus including connective scope, quantification theory including a clear distinction between bound and unbound variables, clear distinction between modes of designation and description, and the treating of all predicates indiscriminately (no nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) Everything else in the language is the baggage believed necessary to make the above differences "non-essential", or needed to make the language usable as "a laboratory instrument". Most of the work has been done in the latter area, bringing in the concepts of "cultural neutrality" and "metaphysical parsimony". The essence of these concepts is that "it forces on its speakers a reasonably small set of assumptions about the world ... perhaps the smallest possible set". "Any speaker, from any culture, should find it possible to express in Loglan what he takes for granted about the world ... without imposing ... or being able to impose - these assumptions on his auditor". As such, the language was designed with a simple grammar, with as few obligatory arrangements as possible, but with a lot of optional ones. Thus, there are no obligatory tenses nor genders nor cases nor inflections that are mandatory to understanding a sentence. The only obligatory concept was the fixed place structure of predicates, the alternative to which is probably some sort of case system with lots of prepositions (case theory was not developed when he started on the language) - linguists still haven't agreed on the essentials of case structures, so it was wise of JCB to choose the path that he did. The language was always intended to be spoken by people of many cultures, and of many different language backgrounds. Each source language speaker was intended to be able to hear "many obvious clues to meaning", the source of our method of building composite gismu. In order to be usable by many cultures, the language design has to be centrally focussed on the concept of "accommodation". We must be able to accommodate all that a speaker might wish to say, either in the language or from previously spoken languages. Thus, we are adding, even at this late date, some form of observationals, as Donald Simpson discusses below. Other key concepts included keeping the size and complexity of the language small, striving for unambiguity in the grammar, which has been achieved, minimizing the plausibility test that I've discussed a couple of times, and ensuring that one can think and speak nonsensically, which is vital for 'logical thought' as practiced by the logicians. As Ralph Dumain notes below, JCB did not go into detail about how the actual test would be conducted. It is, however, definite that he thought about it, as shown in these writings, and he communicated these ideas to others. In any case, we have a couple of visions of the Sapir-Whorf test presented below. It is not clear to me whether JCB presumes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to be true; his attitude seems to include the scientific approach of trying not to let his opinions on the matter govern the experiment design. The language was built to attempt to remove some limits on human thought; these limits are not understood, so that the tendency is to try to remove restrictions whenever we find the language structure gets in our way. You definitely can talk nonsense in Lojban. It turns out that other concepts such as tanru, may be more significant than the logical structures in demonstrating Sapir-Whorf. One thing is to be made clear. As a scientific instrument, Lojban must be built as if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were true, or it will never be seen. This does not mean that a Lojbanist must believe in or agree with Sapir and/or Whorf. However, the question must still be thought relevant. That Sapir-Whorf is still a relevant concept is debated by linguists today. Because it is vaguely worded and generally thought not-testable, it is no longer in the mainstream of linguistic thought. Followers of linguist Noah Chomsky are especially critical of concepts like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as they attempt to probe 'deep structures' in human grammar. They also tend to feel that Loglan/Lojban is presumptive, since it assumes that enough is known about language that one can be developed. In general, therefore, Lojbanists tend to be less sympathetic to Chomsky's ideas than mainstream linguists. But Chomsky's ideas are far from universally accepted, especially outside the United States. Chomsky's theories presume that one can intensively study one language, English, and thereby determine and understand deep structures of all languages. To students of other languages, including Lojban, this seems not only naive but arrogant - since the language they are studying is their own. JCB also discussed the possibility of the language becoming an international language, after the manner of Esperanto. JCB specifically states that he did not intend the language for this purpose. He indicated that "the uncompromising logical character" of the language might make it unsuitable for such a purpose. He notes, however, that others in the community were interested in this purpose. JCB clearly favors an international auxiliary language, and thinks that even if his tool cannot be that language, it could be useful in developing one. There is no direct mention of computer applications for his laboratory tool. JCB is not particularly knowledgeable about computers, and expressed surprise when the computer community was the source for most interest in the language. Perhaps the fact that he foreshadowed predicate-grammar computer languages by decades, though, suggests that in some ways, he was ahead of current computer thought. In any case, pc ended up adding a section on 'Loglan as a Computer Language', when he wrote the 1979 Supplement to L1. This is what JCB said, at least as I understand it. Now lets hear from the community. Viewpoints of Contributors: Donald Simpson, Doug Loss, Ralph Dumain, Jeffrey Kegler, John Parks-Clifford Donald Simpson has written me several good letters. He made some useful suggestions on colors, and in a letter last February, made several comments, some of which are given in the correspondence section after this one. More to the point, Don accused us of retaining some metaphysical biases that needn't be there. I quote from his February letter: "The Little-Word Problem: There are not enough available "little words" in Loglan. Loglanists are heard muttering that perhaps another vowel or two would be useful. Yes, Little-words get used up fast. One reason is that people hate to see unused members of a finite set. Given a command language that uses only single letters of the alphabet, and which requires only twenty functions, most people will immediately invent six more functions, so that they can use up the whole alphabet. Another is that English (and probably any natural language) has enormously many more functions which could be made into little-words, than there are little-words available. Any function which can be served by a predicate instead of a little-word should be. We should look closely at every little-word with the intent of doing what it does with a predicate instead. If there are not several little-words left over, the language is mis-designed, and more work is required. Metaphysical Bias, 1: As a result of using little-words for math terms, over-use of little-words as solutions in general, and unthinking habit, ten as a number base is currently built into the metaphysics of Loglan. The language should be able to handle at least base-sixteen without weird expedients. But this is a minor problem. Metaphysical Bias, 2: I believe that Loglan would benefit from a set of predicate modifiers that are as easy to use as those specifying space and time relationships, but which, instead, indicate the relationship of the speaker to the utterance. For example, is it memory, observation, inference, gossip, expectation, etc. I expect that you will correctly guess that my inspiration for these "observer-based" relationships is articles about Hopi. I opine that the power and general usefulness of such a set of modifiers (and their Whorfian significance) is obvious." Briefly, with his points. I don't know of anyone who wanted to add vowels to make more room for cmavo (little-words). We were happy to move the letterals out of cmavo space, and to gain the added cmavo that are available due to the ' sound between vowel pairs. But this is because a large number of cmavo were intended to be made easy to learn by making them resemble gismu with related concepts, and the job is easier with more space. Not easy enough, it turns out. There also is a shortage of two kinds of cmavo, the CV-form and VV-form ones. The former is reserved for the most used words, and we tried to make them fit patterns that allow them to be easily learned. The latter are reserved for attitudinal indicators, of which there never would be enough using JCB's original system. We've done better, we hope. But in CVV-forms we have over 100 unused words, and don't expect them to change much. I am currently working to reserve a block of cmavo that all start with one letter (x), so that people can invent personal use cmavo on an experimental basis. Hans Havermann and at least one other person mentioned the base-16 concept, and we added those words, though in CVV-form without rafsi. Yes, we do have this bias, but then so do pretty near all other languages. I agree that concepts should be expressed as predicates wherever possible. However, since the basis of the language predicates is logic, it must be remembered that in logic all predicates claim a truth. Most of the cmavo discursives and the like are meant to enable a speaker to make the claim of a predicate without cluttering it up with predicates that are irrelevant to the claim, or which make unrelated claims. Thus "observationals" belong as cmavo - they are ancillary to a claim - and they must be optional, or they would be a bias themselves. From a Sapir- Whorf standpoint, we have no need to include any more new features. That which is to be tested for Sapir-Whorf is there. Additional things like "observationals" are valuable in that they increase our accommodation of other ways of thinking. On the basis of his letter, I asked Don to elaborate on his proposals for "observationals". He went beyond what I asked, and produced the following, which also comments on other aspects of Sapir-Whorf. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ A LONG WALK ON A SHORT WHORF by Don Simpson Well, I've gotten myself into deep water again, arguing that Loglan, a test for Whorf's hypotheses, is Metaphysically Biased by lack of "observationals", and agreeing to do a short paper on what a good set of such would be. Observationals and evidentials are parts of speech that comment on the source and reliability of the speaker's statements. Instead of saying that lemons are sour, you might say that you have tasted a lemon and it tasted sour to you, or that someone you trust has tasted a lemon and she says it tasted sour to her, or that from experience you deduce that lemons are generally sour. Instead of saying that something happened, you might say that you remember seeing it, or remember reading about it. And instead of saying that something will happen, you might say that you expect it to happen. It is possible to say these things in English, as I just did. The trick is to say them as easily and compactly as we use the past, present future, and other tenses, so that we may say them consistently. The advantage of saying these things consistently is that our statements become more informative and are, in a sense, unarguable, for example: I propose that though we believe that the Earth turns, we still say conventionally that the Sun rises, because that is what we see. I accept from logical argument and authority that the Earth turns, but I consistently see the Sun rise. I presume that a hypothetical Flat-Earther accepts from logical argument and authority that the Sun revolves over the Earth, and that he sees the Sun rise, just as I see it. I expect that if he were to tell me that he sees the Sun doing loop-the-loops in the sky, I would probably not believe him, but that I would doubtless have no way of knowing what he saw. The example is long-winded, awkward, and has a number of imperfections that result from the constraints of English grammar. But I thought that Loglan, with its simpler structure and optional tenses, could easily assimilate a set of little words that would do the same work, and do it right. And then I was asked to define such a set. Now, over the years I have seen a few such sets proposed for artificial languages. They had at least three categories: First, direct perception. Second, hearsay. Third, deducing, surmising, imagining, etc. Sometimes there were additional categories for dreams or traditions, modifications for the speaker's estimate of the probable reliability of the information, etc. It seemed to me that those three form a good basic division, and in the right order. Either you see it happen, or someone tells you it happened, or you think about what you've seen and been told and decide something about it happening. So I got out the only book of such proposals that I had on hand, Suzette Haden Elgin's A First Dictionary and Grammar of L adan (pub. 1985 by SF3, Box 1624, Madison, WI 53701-1624), which I recommend highly to any serious student of language construction. And there were the evidentials: __________________________________________________________ 1. known because perceived externally or internally 2. known because self-evident 3. perceived in a dream 4. assumed true because source is trusted 5. assumed false because source is distrusted 6. imagined, invented, hypothetical 7. no knowledge of the validity of the statement 8. no comment on the validity of the statement __________________________________________________________ Additionally, L adan has seven tenses: present, near and far past, near and far future, optative, and hypothetical. And six degrees, five duration types, five repetition types, six speech modes, nine emotionalities, nine states of consciousness, a pejorative, and many other features. Most of these are optional, but if used carefully can give a statement the informational density of some of the Native American languages. However, the use of absolute time tenses means that these are not what I consider true observatives. So I went to the source: Language, Thought, and Reality - SELECTED WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF - MIT Press, Cambridge 1956. Though I claim that this book is required reading for any language designer, it had been years since I had read it, and I had forgotten just how rich in concepts and examples it is. It is a stunner. Whorf discusses linguistic orientations that make Loglan look barely more exotic than French, and a number of his concepts (particularly the idea of covert grammatical categories, or cryptotypes) should probably be applied to Loglan. I began to feel that I was perhaps being foolish in pushing the observational concept for Loglan. Loglan is based on formal logic, which is the very heart of IS-ness. A long, long way (Whorf comments on the Latinate use of space as a metaphor) from an observer-based grammar. Loglan's strength is in its formality, its emphasis on structure and elegance, the application and testing of modern concepts of consistency, completeness, and resolvability. Do I really want it to be more like Hopi? There are three Hopi assertives: Reportive (it happened or is still happening). Expective (it is expected to happen). Nomic (it happens). But, as in L adan, there are also Modes and Modalities, types of Status, and other interacting and modifying categories to complete the picture. One cannot just haul pieces of a language out of its context and have them work right. So I decided that I would have to accept Metaphysical Bias, and see what I thought would be a good set of words that would complement and combine with the other little words in Loglan. Loglan already has forms for questions, hypothetical cases, requests, and orders, which are some of the Modes. I do feel that there is philosophical use for the Expective, though, as an alternative to the Future. I would also like alternates for past/present which distinguish: 1. things directly sensed. 2. things heard about. 3. things inferred/deduced, guessed/intuited, imagined (all crammed into one to save little words). And some form of indicator for how much credence the speaker has assigned the statement. Perhaps this would be best done with a predicate, to save little words, something of the form "X is the source or type-of-source with credence Y of statement Z" or "X is the credence of source or type-of-source Y for statement Z. This would also allow the speaker to be more specific when needed, or just use the four or so little words. By combining these forms with the absolute time tenses, one might get a good set of tenses for time travelers ('I recall that in the future", "I expect that in the past"). Anyone really interested in trying to shake some of the Metaphysical Bias out of Loglan should read Whorf's writings (and the introduction and preface) thoroughly, carefully, and thoughtfully. The book on L adan should help, too. And for some fiction along the same lines, I recommend: The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin Both of these authors are also very aware of language and culture in their other works. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ Bob again: Don claims that "observatives let you make statements that are unarguable. This is the antithesis of a logical language, in that each statement that is a predicate makes a claim, and is thus, in a sense arguable. But several of the ideas are good, and I am investigating them. I have finally located and obtained Carroll's collection of Whorf, and Nora is reading it. She is not done yet, but is not nearly as impressed as I expected. Nora thinks that a lot of Whorf's observations and conclusions seem to be him imposing structures and concepts that he wants to find on the languages he looks at. He also seems to generalize examples into universals. Expressing tense in Lojban is optional, and I personally don't think it will be the easiest thing to use or to explain, especially after reading some of pc's essays, which show just how complex the expression of tense is in English. Not having read some of the material Don mentions, I don't correlate tense with "observationals", but this could be my lack of knowledge of the concept. It seems to me that observationals are more like discursives or attitudinals than tenses, at least in Don's examples from English. Of course attitudinals are easy to use in Lojban, so this may be what he wants. Also attitudinals do not affect the truth value of the predicate claim. We'll look the possibilities over fairly carefully, and you'll see the result in the cmavo list. I've ordered the L adan book, and we'll see whether it is useful. It should be interesting, at least. I also have LeGuin's book, unread, and Nora and Tommy have both read Vance's book, though we don't have it here. My reading is terribly backed up. I'm taking the equivalent of several course in linguistics in my spare time, and am reading books on grammar, semantics, phonology, language universals, and of course, the writing of language textbooks and other teaching techniques. I'll throw in my own reading recommendation: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics. It is encyclopediac in scope, but it isn't a dry alphabetic enumeration of concepts. The author touches on every aspect of linguistics, and gives countless examples. He has a broad viewpoint of what constitutes linguistics, and goes into sign language, problems of the handicapped, and many other sidelights. Heavily loaded with sidebars discussing key points, and a lot of pictures and graphics, this book is excellent for browsing, as well as for cover-to-cover reading, as I've been slowly doing. It is expensive, however. I paid $50 equivalent in England, and I'm not sure of its availability in this country, but I strongly recommend it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Our next letter was the first response that I actually solicited. Doug had been referred to me by someone else who told me that Doug was a long-time community member who had been turned off. He reportedly thought that we had drifted away from testing the Sapir-Whorf concept, which was the only reason he was interested in the language. I wrote to him saying that this was not true, and soliciting his thoughts on the Sapir-Whorf test for this issue. I'll include some preliminaries from his letter to give more context, and because it they are also relevant to the greater topic that we are discussing. Here's Doug. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ Doug Loss Dear Bob, ... thoughts on why I became disillusioned with the original language were pretty much on the mark. I made an early attempt to learn it on my own (alone), but the constant fiddling with the structure made that virtually impossible. I made a go of translating the Lord's Prayer into Loglan (that being traditionally one of the first things translated into a language newly come upon by Westerners; missionaries, you know). The criticisms I got were well meant and well taken, but told me that there was an in-group of hobbyists who were making changes to the language casually, if not whimsically, and that those changes weren't getting out to the Great Unwashed (me and anyone else in the logical hinterlands). After that, I watched the debates in TL with a slightly different viewpoint. A lot of neat stuff got proposed, but nothing ever got accepted as the official way of expressing a thing. Evidently the idea was that usage would sort it all out. About that time I also began to notice a certain vagueness in the point of it all. Pretty obviously, from the premises on which the original language was constructed, the original point was to test Sapir-Whorf. As interest grew and the language attained cult status (I mean that in the same sense that The Lord of the Rings attained cult status) the direction sort of "vagued away." I started to see mention of how great Loglan would be for communicating with computers, or how it could become a world language. It was at about that time that I pretty much lost interest, although I continued to read TL on its very occasional publication. Let me quickly give you my view on those last two points. I'm totally unconvinced that either the old or the new language is radically better for communicating with a computer than any random natural language. The whole point of getting a computer to understand a humanly speakable language is to make using the computer easier and more accessible to more people. Having them learn a new language to talk to the computer with does neither of those things. Furthermore, you won't get people to do it. Even furthermore, the point is moot; devices to recognize continuous speech have been demonstrated, and I expect they will be commercialized within the next five years or so. The accuracy of these devices is pretty good (about 95%, if memory serves); Loglan (generic term here) might increase the accuracy, but even if it doubled it (to 97.5%), I doubt that the benefit would justify the cost of learning a totally new language. The international/world language is a particular bugaboo of mine. Loglan/Lojban will not become a lingua franca. It's that simple. I've done a fair amount of study on the artificial language movement, and I feel quite confident in making that statement. Very few Americans (the only group I've had enough contact with to make a statement about) realize that Esperanto wasn't the only artificial language to gain large groups of adherents. There have been many, but the first that I know much about was Volapk. It meant "world speak" in Volapk, and was extant in the last half of the 19th Century. It fell into disrepute when groups of enthusiasts disagreed on various aspects of the language and fragmented it into many different "dialects." The same thing happened to Esperanto in the first few decades of this century. I don't off hand remember all the variations, but here are some of the names I do: Ido, Mondial, Latino Sine Flexiones, Interlingua, Panglossa (or maybe just Glossa). You've probably never been to a meeting of an Esperanto society. For all they claim millions of speakers worldwide, their meetings seem lifeless. Esperanto seems very much a hobby and not a viable, vital means of expression. I'd really hate to see Lojban become like that. I hope that all that doesn't seem too down. I really think that Lojban could be a very valuable tool in testing Sapir-Whorf. Who knows, out of all the energy invested in doing a scientifically valid test might come another area of application where Lojban would be the obvious choice. I just don't think machine communication or international language are such areas. Bob asked me to write something about the use of lojban in testing the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis. I don't know that I'm the best one to do that, but here goes. Edward Sapir is considered by many to be "The father of American linguistics." He did most of his work with American Indian languages during the early part of this century. If you want to see just how different a language can be, try studying Hopi. This study brought Sapir and one of his best pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to their hypothesis. The hypothesis goes like this (I quote form An Introduction to General Linguistics, by Francis P. Dinneen): If we define "culture" as "what a society does and thinks" (Language, Edward Sapir, p. 219), then the thought aspects of different cultures are strongly conditioned by their particular languages--not, of course, by the formal side of language, nor even directly by the conceptual type, but rather language determines culture through the particular contents of the concepts that make up the world of things in which the culture is interested... In the view of both Whorf and Sapir, it is illusory to think that "experience" can occur without the formative guidance of the linguistic habits of the person experiencing, and that the world we live in is first and foremost one "to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group" (Selected Writings, Edward Sapir, p. 162)... According to the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language differences introduce a new principle of relativity, according to which men are not led by their experience to the same picture of the universe unless their language backgrounds are the same or similar. This hypothesis isn't widely accepted among linguists today. This is partly because the fashion in linguistic theories has moved to discussion of Chomskian deep structures and the like, but also because the hypothesis hasn't been testable. Try as you might, you can't find a natural language against which to measure the others. This is where lojban might come in. We might hope that the grammar of the language, based on symbolic logic, makes the fewest assumptions about the nature of reality possible. By the same token, developing the vocabulary from weighted phonemes from the six most widely-spoken languages is probably the closest we can come to culture neutral words. Such a vocabulary is needed because if a word looks and sounds too much like its cognate in one of the six languages, it's likely to acquire some of the cultural meaning that the cognate word carries, to the detriment of its neutrality. There is, of course, no guarantee that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can ever be shown to be accurate. That's why you do experiments. The point is that no one has ever been able to test the hypothesis before. Setting up such a test would be no mean task. I'm not the one to determine what would constitute a valid test, but I'm pretty sure that one would include some of the following things. You'd need a fair-sized speaking community of fluent lojbanists, made up of people from as diverse of cultural backgrounds as possible. You'd further need homogeneous speaking communities from each of the cultures represented among the lojbanists, as control groups. The lojban group would have to use lojban at least as much as any other languages (ideally, they'd use only lojban) in their daily activities for an acclimatization period. I'd guess that would need to be at least 3-6 months. At that time, tests would be administered to the lojbanists and the control groups. These tests would be specially designed to test the hypothesis somehow; I don't quite know how that would be. Perhaps we should administer a bunch of tests, only one designed to test the hypothesis, so as to keep the participants from knowing what was being sought and skewing the results. Actually, the best way would be to test them in such a way that they didn't know that they were being tested. As you can see, setting up and running a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis test using lojban would be no small undertaking. It would, however, give us a fluent speaking community that could demonstrate other desirable features of the language to the world at large; by its very nature it would extend lojban from its mostly American, natively English-speaking community to a more diverse group; and it would allow us to try to establish a viable community of lojban- users rather than the (let's face it) hobbyists we all are at present. I think using a test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as our goal could be just the push we need to make lojban a usable alternative language rather than just another interesting oddity. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ Bob's notes: On Doug's inspiration, a few people made an ad hoc effort to translate The Lord's Prayer. If I have some extra space below, I'll print it. On the computer interface language concept - I don't think that speech recognition is the justification for Lojban in this application, though it helps. Nor is the purpose to enhance general access to computers. Lojban's advantage, if any, is its simple, unambiguous grammar, which might make it easier for computers to 'understand' what people say to them. Its predicate grammar could presumably perform all the functions of the LISP or PROLOG languages, but the accommodation principle, and Lojban's usability as a natural language, give it a far greater power than those languages to communicate or store human thought in a computer. I'm not sure that any language would be accepted as an international auxiliary language. If one can be, Lojban should be in the running. What Doug says about Esperanto, by the way, seems to be dependent on the group. Other local groups are more active. But in the U.S., we tend to view other languages in general as a 'hobby', not as a vital means of expression. That is because everyone here speaks English or is forced to learn. This isn't true in other countries. I believe that the U.S. in particular is responsible for the stagnation in the international language movement, simply because of our failure to recognize that not everyone wants to learn English. But we have held economic power for several decades, and "he who pays the piper...'. We will see what happens when the Japanese are calling the shots, if things continue as they have recently. In any case, Ralph Dumain has a different perspective on Lojban, both as a means of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and as an international language. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ralph's first letter to me was provocative, and I'll quote a couple of portions before his main article. Ralph: "... My personal feeling is that the acceptance of any constructed language by the world at large has nothing to do with its inherent linguistic qualities. People have been trying to improve upon Esperanto for the past 80 years, rather pointlessly in my view because the acceptance of such a language is dependent purely on political and economic factors, not on linguistic efficiency or cultural bias. "I certainly respect Loglan as a hobby, as a brilliant intellectual exercise, or as an experiment. Has anyone seriously tried to act on Loglan's purported aim of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Personally, I think Whorf was a charlatan and that his view represents a superficial and retrograde racial mysticism. "... I understand that some Loglanists want to teach their children Loglan (as one of their native languages, I presume)... It will be interesting to see how this works with Loglan, as Loglan seems to be radically unlike human language as we know it. If such an experiment succeeds it could have drastic implications for language universals and for Chomsky-like restraints on the properties of possible human grammars." Bob: As you can see, Ralph's point of view is not too sympathetic to Loglan, although he has admitted that he knows very little of the actual language design. This has hurt him, because some of his statements are wrong, simply because of what he doesn't know. pc has reported that he has been able to manipulate the language grammar using Chomskian transformational techniques, and has found nothing extraordinary. I've been reading on language universals in the last month or so, and found that Lojban is probably more normal in these terms than English. In being accommodating to the concepts of other language, Lojban has no place in trying to prove how different it is. In any case, Ralph's and Doug's letters started me to realizing just how many misconceptions there were about Lojban and its goals, and hence led directly to this section. I asked Ralph to write up his viewpoint more completely, since it was contrary to Doug's. I had also received from an Esperantist a draft chapter on the history of the international language movement. He had included material on Loglan/Lojban, and wanted me to review it. He also referred to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its relation to Esperanto. I consulted with Ralph, who had attended LogFest and who seemed to know something about some of the points raised. He agreed to write his thoughts on Sapir-Whorf and Loglan/Lojban, which follow. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ SOME COMMENTS ON THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS AND LOGLAN by Ralph Dumain Benjamin Lee Whorf, in attempting to justify his thesis of linguistic relativity (or, we should rather say, linguistic absolutism), tried to prove that language manifests (and controls) a world view in both its syntax and lexicon. I want to focus on the syntactic aspect of the question, both because it is where Whorf's obscurantism really shows itself and because the proponents of Loglan/Lojban have also concentrated on this aspect. Loglan's claim of metaphysical neutrality based on its syntax is a point best taken up by philosophers of logic. That first order predicate logic is ontologically and culturally neutral (as if there were no controversies in logic) and that somehow in its cognitive effect eventual speakers of Loglan/Lojban become freed from metaphysical presuppositions, are suppositions that deserve closer scrutiny. The scientism of such thinking is very revealing of the subculture of the Loglan/Lojban community. But here I am interested in the reciprocal assumption that the syntax of any natural language embodies any metaphysical viewpoint whatever. Whorf went to great lengths to argue how the aspectual system of Hopi verbs reflects the Hopi concept of time. He never backed up such a claim by actually trying to find out how Hopis think of time. Furthermore, he got away with such nonsense because after all how many linguists knew anything about Hopi? Whorf claimed that Hopi is more akin to the world view of modern physics than the Indo-European languages, a preposterous statement in view of the fact that no Hopi ever received a Nobel Prize for physics but a whole lot of Europeans did. Some other obscurantist anthropologists followed Whorf's lead, but their papers are full of contradictions as well. Whorf could never have gotten away with this had he chosen to analyze Indo- European languages in this way. For example, considering the aspect system of English as contrasted with that of other Indo-European languages, does the use of a simple past tense where in other languages there is a distinction between imperfective and perfective verbs, or the use of the simple present (e.g. "I run") to show customary action and use of the present participle (e.g. "I am running") to indicate real present action, reveal metaphysical differences between English speakers, French, Russians, etc. in their concept of time? Whorf would never have gotten away with that, and in fact he lumped them all together as "Standard Average European." It is quite clear that our ability to analyze and conceptualize time, and to come up with identical interpretations of statements regardless of specific linguistic forms, gives the lie to Whorf's ethnic mysticism. No one was able to put Whorf's claims about syntax to the test, and many questioned his infantile assumptions. In fact linguistic theory was not remotely sophisticated enough to deal with such issues. However, there were experiments to test for possible effects of the lexicon (such as the domains of color and shape) on perceptual discrimination, memory, attention, "codability," yielding contradictory, inconclusive, or methodologically questionable results. The semantics of syntax is a subtle issue, having been addressed by many linguistic theories in the past twenty years: e.g. generative semantics (now thankfully deceased), case grammar (dead), relational grammar (great results at first, started to wane after a while), Montague grammar. Linguists have learned to distinguish the roles of syntactic and semantic interpretation. Government- binding theory (originated by Chomsky) has attempted to parametricize grammatical features in a way that would relate the constructible alternative syntaxes of human language to one another. Because of the modular thinking of linguistics in the 1980s, arguments are made as to whether a particular linguistic phenomenon should be considered proper to syntax, imputed to the lexicon, explainable by external psychological or cognitive factors, etc. Any monolithic view of a metaphysics directly encoded into syntax is hopelessly out of date, a possible ironic achievement of a theoretical tradition seeking to discover universal grammar. The concept of autonomous syntax not synchronically motivated by external cultural factors, e.g. the gender systems of various languages (say French and German), renders ridiculous any facile imputations of world view, even if historically a syntactic phenomenon such as a gender system was originally semantically motivated. The silliness of Whorfianism is masterfully dissected by Frederick Newmeyer in his book The Politics of Linguistics. And even pre-generative linguists and anthropologists were smart enough to recognize that much in language could not be taken literally - was it John Carroll who wrote of dead metaphors? The human mind has a capacity to operate on a more abstract and sophisticated level than the jerry-built machinery of semantics and perhaps even syntax that language has diachronically bequeathed to us. Let me speculatively suggest that in its origin, development, and material basis human language in its entirety is metaphorical, which thought stands upon but which thought easily transcends by its abstractive power. Furthermore, the generative view of language acquisition recognizes that individuals actively construct grammars in their minds based upon their genetically inherited cognitive and linguistic machinery in combination with linguistic input from others. The child language-learner can only deal with a language synchronically and can not know without formal study the history of the language or all the information that was encoded into it through time (e.g. few people know the original meaning of the word "rude" though many understand the double meanings of "vulgar" and "common"; no one alive knows why any particular language developed grammatical gender). Thus the classic Whorfian view is obsolete. Newmeyer believes that the only direct influence of cultural particularity is in the lexicon, although even that is largely a trivial issue. The old shibboleth that the Eskimos have many separate words for different types of snow is an uncontroversial reflection of their environment and in no way implies that Europeans are any the less capable of perceiving distinctions in snow or could not as easily describe them using adjectives. Of course, any language is syntactically biased in that it embodies a particular syntactic system and thus excludes others (left vs. right branching, prepositions vs, postpositions, analytic vs. inflectional, etc.) In this respect Loglan is biased as well, and metaphysics does not necessarily even enter into the question. The naivete of the Loglan/Lojbanists is reminiscent of the foolishness of Esperantists who argue that Esperanto is not an Indo-European language because it is agglutinative and hence could be considered an Asiatic language. Besides the fact that there is no such category as "Asian" languages, besides the fact that agglutination is not the be-all end-all of syntax, exists in varying degrees in many languages, and has no particular correlation with culture or geography, besides the fact that historically the creation of Esperanto was influenced by no non-Indo-european language with the possible exception of Hebrew: from the point of view of universal grammar the (non-) Westernness of agglutination is completely senseless. The Loglan/Lojbanists' philosophical worries about syntax are just as pointless, but they do not have much of an excuse, for they unlike Esperantists consist entirely of highly educated people. This proves that a little linguistics is a dangerous thing. Mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, and computer scientists may know what syntax and semantics are, and may even know what morphology and phonology are, but all too frequently have no idea of what human language is all about. The real issue is semantics, and the interesting issue of bias is not merely among distinct languages, but within subcultures and competing ideological systems within the same language. The most interesting aspect of bias concerns the systems of terms that reveal, conceal, and conflate aspects of reality, the most obvious cases being political, philosophical, and other ideological terminology. So far Loglan/Lojban has concentrated on etymology, ie., its original and clever a posteriori method of using an algorithm to generate essentially a priori words that purportedly suggest their natural language origins. I don't know what has been accomplished in the realm of meaning. I know that the a priori language inventors of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Bishop Wilkins, cast their lexicon in the form of a taxonomy. Taxonomy was good enough for Linnaeus, and is useful for botanists and zoologists, but I think it is a relatively shallow phenomenon as far as cognition is concerned. I shall be interested in seeing how the Loglanists and Lojbanists manage to free themselves from their cultural biases in constructing the semantics of the language. Since the subculture of Loglan/Lojban is extremely narrow and homogeneous, unlike that of the Esperantists or of any national or ethnic culture, it may turn out, as Paul Doudna has suggested, that Loglan/Lojban will be more culturally biased than English or any other language. Loglan/Lojban, like its Enlightenment predecessors, is an attempt at realizing the old dream of making the outward form of language isomorphic to its inner content. If this is at all possible, look to linguistics for suggestions as to how it really might be accomplished. Human cognition can function very well without such isomorphism, yet if there is any cognitive issue related to Loglan/Lojban, it is efficacy of expression. Perhaps as a tool for thought training, the precision of expression that Loglan/Lojban purports to make possible might be a selling point. Some Lojbanists envision teaching the language to their children. Hopefully, they won't drive their children crazy as some logicians have done. While this might be an interesting experiment, the question remains, also perceptively raised by Paul Doudna, whether Loglan/Lojban is an autonomous language or whether it is parasitic on English or whatever other natively-spoken natural language is used. This is an especially crucial question because Loglan's grammar seems to be radically unlike human language as we know it and therefore there may be doubt as to whether Loglan is a possible human language. Some question the autonomy of Esperanto, although Esperanto is unquestionably a human language and certainly exists in its own right even taking linguistic interference into account. But can Loglan stand on its own, or like formal logic or mathematics, could it be only an ancillary tool employed for specific purposes and unlearnable as a native language? And as logicians are as biased as any illiterate, what do the metaphysical neutrality and cultural impartiality imputed to Loglan really amount to? For those who envision Lojban as a future international language, let me remind them that bias is a political issue, not linguistic. I have seen no evidence that James Cooke Brown ever seriously considered how to use Loglan to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I think he is guilty of bluffing, of waving the banner of Sapir-Whorf as a magic wand. This is scientism, the appearance of science without the substance. His unabated ignorance of the development of linguistics and his failure to learn from fair and warranted criticisms of his work voiced in book reviews or in response to grant proposals represent a fundamentally anti-scientific attitude and a crackpot mentality. His followers and ex-followers seem to have learned nothing as well. 'Language and cognition' is still an open-ended issue. Loglan/Lojban could prove a worthwhile tool of thought training. The issue must be efficacy and precision of expression, not the metaphysical jailhouse of linguistic relativity. If Sapir-Whorf is very much alive for the Loglan/Lojbanists, so much the worse for them. The vampire will feed upon their living flesh and spirit them off to the realm of the dead. NOTE: This article appears by special permission of the author, who retains all rights and may republish it as he wishes. --Ralph Dumain, July 20, 1988 ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ Bob again: I have to say that I disagree with both Ralph's opinion and his style of expressing it. He did, however, raise points that need consideration, and I have no aversion to printing opinions that disagree with my own. I wish Ralph had expressed his views more constructively, though. He seems to attack everyone, from Whorf, to JCB, to those of us working on the language today, and he attacks the Esperantists as well. One wonders if Ralph finds anyone's viewpoint reasonable other than his own. Does he have any better idea of what human language is all about than those he accuses? If so, he should express it. I could go to some length rebutting Ralph's paper, but he does a fine job of it himself. After going to great lengths to demonstrate that Sapir-Whorf hasn't been tested, and wasn't all that interesting or relevant, he states that "bias is a political issue, not linguistic". This statement assumes that the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis is wrong, making his reasoning circular. Later, he says that he doesn't know what we are doing in the area of semantics (not that much, really), then describes and lambasts the taxonomic systems of earlier languages. This is irrelevant to Lojban, which is in no way taxonomic. And of course, his claim that the reciprocal of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an 'assumption that the syntax of any natural language embodies any metaphysical viewpoint whatever' seems false. This type of assumption would be relevant to a hypothesis that cultures (which tend to have a metaphysical viewpoint) determine the bounds of language, but not to Sapir-Whorf. In Ralph's invective, however, there are some words of wisdom. Indeed, there is a bias in Lojban's designers - what he calls scientism, though he uses the term derogatively. There is embedded in Lojban the assumption that the expressions of predicate logic are relevant to metaphysical outlook, that making the tools of predicate logic easier to use would in some way bring about the Sapir-Whorf effect by removing some constraints on human thought. This assumption may not be true; no one has ever built and spoken a language based on predicate logic before. But it is an open and admitted assumption. We also presume that the scientific method is valid, that accommodation is a satisfactory way of reducing cultural bias, etc. There are a lot of assumptions behind the project we have undertaken. Some may be false, and may invalidate the experiment. But Ralph has no more knowledge than we do as to which assumptions might be wrong, and which can be modified without changing the language. The implicit fact that a language is regular, that it has structural rules, itself imposes a bias. Now, according to Ralph, bias is political and not linguistic, but he spends a good deal of his time picking out some potential biases. Since the main danger in using this language for experiment is unrecognized bias, this is valuable, although I don't think Ralph actually brought up any that were unknown. Loglan/Lojban was designed to be biased, but in a recognizable way, one that can presumably be accounted for in tests to see if those biases transfer to, and/or limit thought. I think that Ralph is not correct that the subculture of this community is narrow and homogeneous. Yes, we are mostly Americans, and effectively all of us are English speakers, and all of us are highly educated by world standards. I doubt if even these admissions make us homogeneous in thought, though, and the varieties of opinion on why we are building this language reveal that diversity. Even if Ralph were correct, however, there are two ways to be narrow: you can have people all alike who steep themselves in their own thoughts, or you can have people of similar background looking outwards to achieve greater understanding, and multiplying their capabilities to grow by building on their common background. Which will our community choose? That is your decision. A last general criticism is on Ralph's accusation that Loglan/Lojban will be 'parasitic on English or whatever other natively-spoken natural language is used'. If one uses his logic, however, no one should ever bother learning a 'foreign language', as opposed to a native tongue, because you are only using it parasitically on your original language. The corollary is that one can never truly learn to 'think' in a foreign language, which seems to be false. If Lojban never achieves sufficient autonomy as a language that it can be taught as a native tongue to children, and that it can be used across the full spectrum of human experience, then the Sapir-Whorf test can never be conducted. This is why we need you to start learning and using Lojban now. At least one other fact of Ralph's article is wrong by my knowledge. Case theory is far from dead. I have recently received from England a new book entitled The Case for Lexicase, which is a summary of the current theory as it has been used (evolving over about two decades) at Cambridge University, which has an extensive linguistics research unit. We got this book through our follow-up of a chapter sent to us by Paul Doudna from an out-of-print book called Inferential Semantics, which was written by a member of that research team several years ago. Both books seem interesting; the recent one will certainly prove valuable in determining what (if any) rules are needed for defining place structures. I personally feel that Ralph's statements about JCB are out of line, and based on a lack of knowledge. I have my disagreements with JCB, but I do not question his scientific integrity. There have been other criticisms of his methodology, on the language as a whole, on his knowledge of the field of linguistics, and on specific techniques used to evaluate linguistic data. To the extent that these criticisms are intellectual and are used to strengthen the eventually quality of the experiment, they are valuable. When they are used purely to denigrate the man or the experiment, as Ralph seems to be doing, we are going beyond science to personalities. Ralph does his beliefs a great disservice by these attacks, as his article does as well. He expresses interest in having this republished later. I suggest that he rework it so that his comments are constructive rather than destructive. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The next submission came unsolicited via the 'Capital Loglan Bulletin Board'. Mr. Kegler has also written to JCB previously on other subjects, and was published in LogNet last year. While we have had communication from several proponents of views similar to his, this message summarizes the position most effectively. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ From: Jeffrey Kegler to: Bob LeChevalier Subject: Anglan I hope some suggestions from a very infrequent participant in your group might be of interest. I believe that attempting to create an entirely new vocabulary is counter- productive. I will attempt the argument for this as follows. First, I will try to show that English is extremely popular world-wide as a language of commerce-- a de facto make-shift universal language. Second, I will point out difficulties on coming up with a new vocabulary. Third, I will briefly point out English's problems as a universal language. Then I will sum up with an argument for an Anglicized Lojban (AngLog). Note that implied here is that my goal is creation of a universal language, not testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. First, English has a lot of momentum as a universal language. "The Story of English", a recent PBS series and accompanying book, makes this case very well and I will just try to list a few provocative facts. A firm named IVECO is headquartered in Turin. The money is French, German and Italian. Corporate business is conducted in everyone's second language, English. English is the language of air flight. A Malayan pilot landing in Saudi Arabia speaks English to the tower. Attempts to spread the native languages in South Africa and India are resisted as impositions of the leading language group to wipe out the others. The language the minorities want to be taught as a second language-- English. Probably, if Mandarin Chinese were to be mandated as a universal language, the resistance would be strongest in China itself. Any of you familiar with a specialized scientific or technical literature will know that much of this first appears in English, regardless of the nation where first published or the native language of the author. Note that the English embraced by the world's people is often adapted, with local vocabulary and pronunciation variants. We Americans would be considered by the English to speak such a local dialect. Second, it is sometimes argued that Lojban words should not have a one-to-one correspondence with the English equivalents. I believe this is unavoidable. All the literature about Lojban is in English, and Lojban dictionaries define their words in English. If you have ever tried to translate between two languages whose speakers have a lot of contact (between English and French, for example), you will notice how often the usual translation of a word in one language acquires all the implications of the word in the other, so that they tend to become precise equivalents in almost all contexts. And where a language with a vast literature and long history, like Italian, starts sprouting words like "debuggare", to debug, how will Loglan fight off these influences? For any group of people to develop a vocabulary sufficient to cover all present needs, much less future ones, seems to me very unlikely. Adaptation of a successful technical language's vocabulary is really the only hope. Even with the English language, evolving technology puts strains on the huge vocabulary available. Third, I can be brief in pointing out English's problems as a universal language to this audience. Its irregular spelling, worse than most other languages, and ambiguous syntax, in common with most natural languages are two difficulties for new human learners and machine understanding. I can outline English's problems further, but I do not think anyone in this forum needs me to do so. Fourthly, then I propose creation of an Anglan. Combine the syntax of Loglan and that of English, adding Lojban particles as necessary. Create a set of rules for the transliteration of words from English (and perhaps other languages). The result should have the momentum of English with none of its difficulties. The dictionary for Anglan would be short--just the new words necessary to implement a logical syntax. For the rest, the interested party should consult an English dictionary. As a side effect, this should eliminate the Lojban legal entanglements. Neither English vocabulary or the laws of logic, whether existing or invented, are copyrightable, patentable or protectable as trade secrets, even where someone can prove they invented a field of logic, or an English word. I realize the fast outline of a program for Anglan given above glosses over some difficulties. I am simply trying to argue it is far easier than the alternatives. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ I will let pc answer Jeff. pc's experience and credentials as a linguist far exceed my own, and he has additional credibility as a spokesperson for the goals of the language, having been the only other person JCB has ever allowed in that role (i.e., in the Supplement to L1). pc then gives his own viewpoint on the nature of the Sapir-Whorf test. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ John Parks Clifford (pc) Anglan One of the most frequently made suggestions for developing a new language (or changing one already in development) in the present pattern, is that we should draw our vocabulary directly and exclusively from English, rather than making words up from some apparently random scraps of words from some set of different languages. The usual justification for this suggestion is that anyone, from whatever native language, who is likely to get involved with Lojban, will already know English, the de facto world intellectual language. Further, the supposed recognition aid that Lojban word derivation gives to native speakers of the source language does not, in fact, amount to much, since the pieces are so distorted and hard to find as to be as often misleading as helpful (and we can all think of cases in point). It is, after all, the grammatical structure that is the important thing for Lojban, not the lexical items that fill its slots. It would, of course, be possible to make a language with Lojban grammar and English vocabulary, call it Anglan, say. But it would not be Lojban nor even of the Lojban pattern, for the derivation of the vocabulary is as much a part of the pattern as is the grammar (indeed, more so, since vocabulary construction antedates unambiguous grammar as a part of the program.) As long, then, as we are faithful to the whole project, we cannot shift to a single language (or even a set of closely related languages) as source. But beyond this appeal to tradition, as it were, for not constructing Anglan, there are a number of other, external, reasons for thinking it would not be worth doing within the less specific parameters of the Lojban project. Here is a brief list of some of the major ones. 1. While the source of the words may not be important to its purposes (a claim we will examine below), the shape of them is. For almost any purpose, the fact that an utterance is uniquely decomposable into words at the phonological level plays an essential role. While there may be other patterns than the present one for doing this, whatever pattern is used will involve some fairly severe restraints on word shape. And these constraints, whatever they are, will not be met by words of English, taken unaltered. Thus, even in Anglan, the source words would at least sometimes (and probably usually) be distorted and, in a dense language like English, therefore misleading. Much of the supposed advantage would thus be lost even for native English speakers, without any compensating advantage for speakers of other languages. 2. One of the purposes of Lojban is to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (vide alibi [ed. note - this means see below]). For this, the test subjects would be monolingual speakers of various languages. Thus, the claim that they would all know English would not hold in this case, a central one for the project, at least in its inception. 3. Another possible (though certainly not central) use of Lojban would be as an international language at some level. Again the assumption has to be that the users would not know English, since, if they did, they would already have their international language. And, of course, if we were going to bother to teach them a language with an English vocabulary, we might as well teach them English, which would offer them a wider access to the world than the limited one - whatever it is - that Anglan would make available to them. Even the claim that Anglan has simpler grammar or is machine parsible could be met with reasonable subset-Englishes, which are slightly odd only from the point of view of full English, and allow access to most of it. Much the same sort of comments apply to the use of Lojban (or Anglan) as a language of machine control. 4. Note that in either of the latter cases, Anglan or subset English as either international language or machine control language, the big problem is that of importing things from the full or source language into the derived or subset one, where they do not fit. By the nature of Lojban (hence Anglan) grammar, the words of the language, even if they were identified with English sources, would rarely mean exactly the same as those sources. What the place structure of a given predicate is, is largely a matter of usage or is someone's best guess and is not something that can be figured out from just the English (or even from all the languages taken together.) Thus, knowing the English source would be misleading again, even if it were the only source. We already, being entirely an English-speaking group, have problems with bits of English usage creeping into our Lojban, and this would multiply if there were no constant reminder that the language is not just coded English. 5. Even though English may be a de facto international language, it is not always welcomed in that role. To attach yet another item, especially one which became important for some purpose - machine control or conference abstracting, for example - to English would make it harder for the proposed language to come to use, even after its essential virtues (parsibility in both these cases) were apparent. Testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Another common question is, How do you test the Sapir-Whorf Hypotheses? This, after the question whether it is testable at all, has always been a major point about the Hypothesis. We can only answer about tests in which Lojban is to play a role. In broad terms, the Hypothesis claims that the limits of the language one speaks are the limits of the world one inhabits (also in Wittgenstein), that the grammatical categories of that language define the ontological categories of the word, and that combinatory potentials of that language delimit the complexity of that world (this may be Jim Brown's addition to the complex Hypothesis.) The test then is to see what changes happen in these areas when a person learns a language with a new structure, are they broadened in ways that correspond to the ways the structure of the new language differs from that of the old? The ideal test, to which we may hope eventually to approximate (after several reasonable successful tests with, say English speaker) would require at least 1000 young monolingual native speakers of each of the base languages (and maybe a few others, to be on the safe side.) These would all be given a battery of tests to define the nature of their world views, as sketched above (limits, categories, combinations.) Each language group would then be divided into a number of subgroups, each as representative of the group as a whole as possible. One of these subgroups from each language group would be taught Lojban. Other subgroups would be taught variously another language closely related to the native language, a language totally different from the native language, logic and advanced mathematics, world literature, philosophy, a social science, a life science, and a physical science. All of these courses would be intense and thorough - the language course by the total immersion method. Finally, one subgroup from each language group would be kept out of all these courses and merely entertained or left to their normal life for the duration of the experiment (about a half a year, say.) At the end of the experiment, all the participants would be put through the battery of world view tests again. The Hypothesis would be supported if the second test for those who studied Lojban differed from the first test in ways that correlated with the ways in which the structure of Lojban differed from that of the native language. Further, these differences would be different from those which could be accounted for simply by learning a new language (factored out on the basis of the groups who learned languages similar to their native one) or learning a radically new language (the other language learning subgroups) or learning new facts or a new discipline or, indeed, simply getting through another half year. Further confirmation would be found if the results of the various Lojban-learning groups came to be more similar on the second test than they were on the first and these similarities were also correlated with Lojban structure. Negative evidence would come from failure anywhere along the line (this is a pretty risky test): no change or change that is not correlated with Lojban structure or not distinct from that for learning another language or discipline or from maturation or change that does not bring different groups closer together. The part of this outline that is least clear (and probably what the question is really about) is the world view test. So far as we know, there are no such test, though many existing tests may do a bit of what is needed. It is for this reason that every scenario for the experiment has included a clever social psychologist, who might either devise such tests or select from the available or, perhaps, find the right analysis of available (and created) material to do the trick. We may assume that the earlier experiments mentioned in passing would have served to refine and validate the instrument used. A further improvement would result simply from the pretesting phase of the grand experiment, when the various language groups each revealed its common core in distinction to all the others (or, at least, all the significantly different ones.) To be sure, this process may seem a bit circular, testing an hypothesis by using an instrument chosen because it gives confirmatory results in previous tests of the hypothesis, but this kind of circularity is typical of the rebuilding-the-boat-while-sailing-on-the-water approach needed in social sciences and does not invalidate the results, since there is a significant chance of getting no correlations at all at each stage, and thus disconfirming the hypothesis. ________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________ pc's view on the Sapir Whorf test is new to me also, so I'm glad he wrote it up. Most of us have presumed that native Lojban speakers would be needed, and he does not mention this as a requirement. It could even be said that for pc's experiment, we needn't even have a language demonstrably capable of serving as a natural language, since it is a second, possibly auxiliary language to all participants who speak it, and he mentions no requirement that these participants speak only Lojban during the test. Bob's Response to Jeff pc didn't really address one of Jeff's points, and it is one that I've gotten useful information on. As Americans, we see the English language from one perspective only, and we don't often hear the opposing views. I don't want to fault the PBS series, which I haven't seen, but it was written by an English- speaker. The arguments whether English is becoming, or should become, a (the) world auxiliary language, go both ways. Much of my information comes from Esperantists, who obviously tend to share a different point of view. Is English truly a world language? First of all, which English? One source, author Anthony Burgess (Language Maid Plane), who incidentally supports English as a world language, notes that the language has diverged so much that it can barely be understood. He gives an example from a Tamil (in India) phrase that had to be written down before he could understand it. In another place in the book, he tells of when he moved to Lancashire England and his wife could not understand several local expressions, even though she was had been born only a short distance away. From an Esperantist, I have a story of how the British tried to import skilled labor from India into Kenya, and had to send them home because the two English dialects were mutually unintelligible. Then we turn to foreigners who learn English. Our spelling and pronunciation is among the more obscure of the world languages. Any attempt to internationalize English would have to change this, and there is perhaps heavier resistance to such change than to learning other languages. Jeff mentions English as the international language of air flight; actually it is the one for air traffic control. But the UN organization governing air traffic control has the highest translation budget of any of the UN organizations in the attempt to make sure that the controllers know what they are saying. They don't really speak English; it is a code to them. The results can be catastrophic, since there have been air mishaps caused by misunderstandings of the 'English'. Will you rest comfortably flying over foreign territory knowing that your pilot might hear 'Go round!' as 'Ground!'? The reason English is used, by the way, is twofold. Firstly, there is generally no better alternative known to most controllers and pilots; in Latin America, though, it is Spanish and not English that is used in the control tower. Secondly, when the international air traffic control system was set up, right after World War II, American planes and pilots were the vast majority of those in the skies; this is no longer true for pilots, and American dominance of the aircraft industry is being reduced. This is just a sidelight of the wider reason why English is so widespread. It has nothing to do with scientific literature; most such material was written in French and German until World War II, but Latin was more widely taught in American schools in that era. England had a colonial empire wherein most locals were illiterate, and there was no written form of their language. Imperial England thus spread its language to the educated of all of its colonies, and these are the bulk of the countries where English is widely spoken in some form. We did likewise with our few colonies, such as the Philippines. These countries have been independent only a generation or so, but English is already losing ground. The British generally left behind a written form of the local languages, which has allowed those languages to become the primary ones taught. Jeff is correct about groups of South Africans and Indians resisting Afrikaans and Hindi. They aren't winning, though. At best, they are gaining English being taught in addition to the favored language. In 1940, in India, you had to speak English to get ahead. Now, although perhaps a third of the populace knows some English, you must know Hindi to succeed. In China, Mandarin has been made the official language, and is mandatory in all schools. The massive increase in Mandarin literacy in China is what caused the major increase in Chinese weighting in Lojban gismu-making, as compared with JCB's 1950's data. Hong Kong is shortly to revert to Red China. The natives are being taught Mandarin now, in addition to English. In the Philippines, English is still widely understood, and is one of the official languages. However, a side effect of the Aquino revolution is that English is no longer permitted on their television in the evenings; only Tagalog is allowed. Students have launched major demonstrations at universities when their professors tried to lecture in English, shouting them down with chants of 'Tagalog'. English is the most widely taught foreign language in other countries, by the way. This does not mean that it is taught well, or that it is widely known or used. How well do you know a foreign language you learned in school? Probably better than most Japanese know English. Esperantist Donald Harlow told me of a Japanese Esperantist friend who has credentials to teach English in Japan - she was certified for 30 years; yet she cannot speak English, and can minimally get by reading it. Apparently, she needed only to pass a written test to get the credential. She says that 90% of English teachers in Japan have her skill level. How well do you believe their students will speak English after the class? In Russia, things are a little better. 70% of all students take some English, and apparently the instructors are better qualified. However, while an American author visiting Russia found that the places he visited on the state tour to always have English speakers, whenever he went out to talk to people on the street, they used German to mutually communicate. A final reason for English's widespread use in the world is economic. To work in an American or British-run factory, one had to know some English. Now the Japanese are buying those factories and building new ones. Another documentary tells of the Japanese in Singapore (formerly a British colony), who had to learn English in order to communicate with their workers. A few minutes later, though, they show factory workers in a classroom with headphones on, learning Japanese. Americans are losing are total world dominance, and I believe that English has therefore reached its peak as a 'world language'. If you live in the Southwest U.S., the odds are good that you speak Spanish as well as English. In some parts of the U.S. where the Japanese have bought factories, that the managers must learn Japanese or lose their jobs. The next generation may see people arguing for Japanese (or more likely Chinese) as a world language. Or perhaps Lojban? Jeff also mentioned the problem of languages transferring semantics when a word is translated. This is a problem, and one that concerns us. This is why I keep hitting people over the head with cultural neutrality. A translator is aware that there may be a difference in meaning between two words can, by being careful in the translation, defeat the tendency to read more into the words than is really there. This is especially viable in Lojban, which can make arbitrarily fine distinctions in meaning, and which makes it difficult to transfer certain assumptions about time. In short, if Sapir-Whorf is true, Lojban's structure will cause a difference in the way Lojbanists look at ideas, even those transferred from English. We also can defeat this tendency by gaining greater representation among non- English native speakers. While at this stage, these people also must speak English in order to learn Lojban, they presumably would tend to write things in Lojban in translation from their own languages, or to draw on their native experiences, rather than to borrow from English speakers. We are continually exploring ways to bring greater participation from this group, and we will also be translating Lojban materials into at least 1 or 2 non-English languages as soon as we can. The last of Jeff's points that I will deal with in this essay is the borrowing of technical vocabulary. Jeff makes the example of 'debuggare' from Italian. If the concept he mentions has a limited technical meaning which is identical in Italian usage as it is in English, there is no problem with borrowing it. Lojban will do the same. We have no fear of the semantics transfer associated with these words because the transfer is pretty much independent of the culture, and is only used by the segment of the populace that programs computers. There is no Italian word that this is displacing, and the English word being borrowed has partially Latinate etymology in the first place, so it doesn't even seem strange. I use his example, the English jargon word 'debug', in a discussion of le'avla vs. lujvo following this special section. Now, it is true that there may be the capability to coin a word from totally Italian roots that would mean the same as 'debug', and would be different from 'debuggare', but who is to gain. Jeff implies that the Italians resist this type of borrowing, but not in any systematic manner. Now the French, on the other hand, would be less likely to accept such a borrowing, and would coin a 'pure' French word. They have an Academy to enforce this policy, and enough state control to make it hold. The Germans, are prone to make their own metaphors rather than to borrow, as are the Chinese. The Japanese borrow freely, as do the Arabs, but they heavily modify the words to fit their language structure, using syllables to override consonant clusters in the former case, and using only the consonants as meaningful semantic indicators in the latter. Lojban will follow the latter approach, borrowing freely but heavily modifying words to fit our unambiguous morphology. There is no reason to doubt that this will hold true while the language is first being spread, since that morphology offers one of the selling points of the language. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - pc's was the last of the contributions solicited specifically for this topic. But I have heard from many more of you on the subject of why you are interested in Lojban, and on what you want and need from us. The next section consists of excerpts from just a few of those letters, which I will generally include without comment. The letters are presented in chronological order. Excerpted Viewpoints of Correspondents [Bob: The first letter is from one of the few 'drop-outs' I've had - actually he had given up before we started - who tells us why the language failed him. Even in dropping out, he helped us learn about what people wanted. He also donated his collection of materials, a spare set that has proven handy since then.] 7/86 "This is in response to your Loglan prospectus. I will not be taking part. "I've forgotten how I learned about Loglan; perhaps it was through the Scientific American article. My initial enthusiasm peaked on receiving a copy of L1, the waned fairly rapidly, and I never did make any concerted effort at studying it. There were always excuses, among them dabbling in Swahili, Quechua and a couple Polynesian languages. "Eventually, this was several years ago, I came to the realization that I dislike the language -- the Chicken MacNugget-like primitives are ugly, its expressions too dense... So I haven't responded to any Institute mailings since then. "Intellectually I'm as much convinced as ever that the concept is worthwhile and that the effort is much superior than any previous constructed language. Then too, my sense is that most of us are lamentably indifferent to matters of language. But that doesn't make me want to spend my time on Loglan. "...Good luck in getting your SIG going." William J. K. Harrington 6/87 "I am a long time passive member of the loglan interested set and I just want to thank you for activating the language and for the recent mailing... "I grant all due respect to JCB for creating loglan so long ago, but now it is his private obsession. This would be all right too if he hadn't involved the public (me) by selling books, using us for word "taste" tests, etc. We have been used, and have a right to expect reasonable progress, not including arbitrary halts for JCB to retain control. "Once loglan ceases to be JCB's private game, it faces new dangers. The loss of standardization is perhaps the main one. After all this is one of the appealing things about a language built by design for consistency, ease of use, and above all to facilitate communications. We have the precedents of Forth, Pascal, Prolog, etc. before us. We have to realize that once the cut is made between the concepts and ideas of the language (unpatentable) and the words themselves (copyrightable) there is nothing to stop others from doing likewise. And Babel will arrive. This is where we came in. I do not have the answer, but hope for one main loglan-type language ultimately. Meanwhile, the sooner we can speak Loglan-X the better." G. L. Koenig 9/87 "... I do, however, have some interest in the premise around which Loglan was constructed, and I have read the 1960 Scientific American article and have started to memorize the 112 words. My interest in the premise revolves around the fact that my youngest daughter is profoundly deaf and communicates in sign language. She is 13 years old, is mainstreamed in a total communications program and seems to have an extremely well developed ability to handle problems of logic. "... Sign language is based on English, but does not have the structure for math or logic. At least it does not seem that it has the needed concepts and structure." Claude Van Horn [Bob: It occurs to me in typing this that Jerome Frazee's symbology might be highly adaptable to sign language, given its pictorial content. Claude, you might want to try this idea with your daughter, and to contact Jerome for more ideas. Let me know.] 2/88 "In 1977, I bought a copy of Loglan Grammar and the Loglan dictionaries 1 & 2. I studied hard and practiced sounding out the words. I had no one to speak to, but I was willing to study and wait. Later, I heard of revisions to grammar and word lists and I thought I was fighting a losing battle. I then quit, and the process of forgetting has been painless. "Now you come along and stir up old dreams and make it look promising. Can you deliver the dream? "What I am looking for in lojban is simple. I want a language I can speak, write, and teach to my son. Something fairly easy to learn. Something dynamic but not changing every day because it isn't finished. Your promise of a baseline may give me what I want. I hope so, because I am willing to give it another try; particularly now that I have someone to talk to." Dan Cheek 2/88 "Glad to see someone getting on with the job. In Cambridge Loglan classes run by Chuck Barton and Scott Layson, I had advocated revolt against the nitpickery in The Loglanist. I soon came to realize that no workable universal language can be as simple as I'd imagined on first reading the Scientific American article. As the saying goes in R&D work, everything takes longer. Nonetheless, the world will ultimately need Loglan, so keep up the good work. "In 1957 I began a book on war-prevention ethics which offered a cultural immunization program for children. Recent findings now allow completion of the tough part, the adult section. A culture-free language, initially a universal second language, is one item to be called for." Milton W. Raymond 2/88 "Thank you for including me in your mailing. I am certainly willing to support your efforts. "My main interest in Loglan (or Lojban, or any similar language) is in learning to use it. I would like to see some personal effects related to S-W, and I would also like to eventually be able to have my computer take loglan input and produce loglan output. ... "As far as loglan-type languages and computers are concerned, my personal feeling (based on not much more than gut feel) is that a more workable (and perhaps useful) first application is as a database query/maintenance language than as an artificial intelligence language. "Although I have been associated with the Institute off and on since 1975, I have never managed to learn Loglan. I am therefore interested in Lojban, since you appear to have a better handle on teaching than does the Institute. You have also published a schedule, which is the first I have seen from anyone on any GPA. I agree that the Institute appears moribund. ... "What I have been hoping for from the Institute and have not yet received, is a way to "bootstrap" my ability to read and understand Loglan. ... I have not been able to learn in isolation. "On the subject of humor in Loglan, I haven't seen any. I feel that anecdotal humor should have few problems. I think double entendres and puns would be almost impossible, due to the intent of the language design. That is, in fact, the only thing my wife likes about Loglan. Vickie approves of anything which limits my ability to make puns. I'm not at all certain that metaphors can fill the etymological niche occupied by puns. [On the letter from Paul Doudna in HL3:] "I understand plausibility tests by the listener to be against the spirit of the language. Loglan 1 stated that being able to speak nonsense unambiguously and intelligibly was one of the features of the language... Perhaps the limiting of assumptions is not total, but I doubt that it could be. If a language made no assumptions, period, then it would not be a language, since there could then be no common referents among speakers. It seems to me that 'house-containing blue objects' and 'house inhabited by blue-skinned people' are more complex concepts than 'house which appears blue', and deserve a more complete exposition to get the idea across. Perhaps Ockham's Razor should be made a part of the language definition under 'resolvability of metaphors and predicate pairs'. Of course, that assumes that speakers and listeners share enough of a word-view that Ockham's Razor will bring them to the same point." Steve Wheeler [Bob: Steve is an 'aficianado', and wrote this letter after having received NB3. His comments on the quality of available teaching materials thus are especially relevant. On Steve's comments re. Doudna's letter: Plausibility tests are valid for the listener; metaphysical parsimony means that the speaker must make the fewest possible assumptions about the listener's metaphysical outlook. This would make the use of Ockham's razor invalid, since, as Steve pointed out, the listener may not have the same world view. Given an incomplete exposition, the listener is therefore allowed to infer whatever he/she chooses about the ellipses. Pragmatic considerations in normal communication will lead to plausibility tests on these ellipses. If the speaker leaves no ellipses (and a tanru is inherently elliptical), the need for plausibility tests goes away. The three interpretations of 'blue-house' are equally complex according to both English and Lojban grammar. All three are expressible as relative clauses with one level of subordination. (Relative clauses are a possible topic for JL7.) Using comparable wording in English to match the Lojban we have 'nest such-that it contains blues (or blue-objects)', 'nest such-that blues (or blue-people) inhabit it', and 'nest such that it appears blue (or blue-out-surfaced)' It is our world view that causes external appearances to be more important than internal details, which of course causes worse problems than plausibility tests in other fields of human endeavor.] 4/88 "I think more than ever that we need a maximum language for world use. However I believe Loglan in both forms will be most useful in the eventual construction of a maximum language. Unfortunately I am 79 and doubt if I live to hear such a language." Faith Rich 8/88 "I'd like to thank you for having 'kept the faith' and left me on your mailing list ... even without hearing from me in any way. After reading JL4 and JL5, I feel a bit of the old spirit and once again get the impression that Loglan (whatever name we call it) has some vitality, an impression I haven't had for some years even while things were ostensibly happening - I think that what was missing was a feeling of growth, not just continuation along a logical path." Rohan Jayasekara The Editor's Viewpoint Hopefully, these letters gave you some sense of the variety of goals and desires of the members of the community. You also may glimpse how I might feel in receiving them; feelings that have compelled me to continue in spite of JCB's opposition. It is hard to say no to letters like these, and this is but a sampler. There are several other opinions out there as to why Lojban is interesting and/or important. So why Lojban? I believe that ALL reasons for creating, learning, and using Lojban must be accepted as valid, since each plays a part in making Lojban interesting to some segment of our audience. For Lojban to be a language and not a linguistic toy, it needs the broad base of speakers implied by these various interests. In any case, Lojban is already a composite of all these goals, whether or not they are fully realized. The goals are valid to the extent that each motivates people to contribute to the language. Without all these people, and therefore without all these various goals, the language would never have made it this far. We who value Lojban owe each viewpoint respect and understanding. I hope these contributions and letters cause you to value some aspects of Lojban that you had not considered before. As for me, I will strive to enable the language to fulfill as many of your goals as possible. Some tradeoffs are going to be necessary; not all people will be satisfied by any of our decisions. It is my job and my skill as 'systems engineer' to recognize and try to balance these tradeoffs to maximize the quality of the resulting product. I'd like for Lojban to live up to Mr. Harrington's evaluation of its quality; he might eventually decide that our result 'makes him want to spend time'. I believe enough in my abilities to allow me, in good faith, to promote the language as strongly as I have been. I believe enough in the value of the work I am doing, that I have continued unemployed to allow me to put my full effort into achieving these ends. I am determined to set a standard of quality and thoroughness for this effort, given the constraints under which we have worked, that no one will ever consider 'splitting' off because they believe they can do better. I had no training in linguistics when I started to work on Lojban last year, when it became clear that JCB would not allow me to work with his version of the language on terms that I could accept. In fact, probably like most of you who received them, I couldn't understand 90% of the stuff in TL when it came out. I haven't read Whorf's writings, nor Chomsky's. I learned a smattering of Spanish in elementary school, the same for German in high school. I remember almost nothing of either. While I have some competence in computers through professional experience, I am learning about artificial intelligence, the field where Lojban has most likely application, through my work with the language. While I have trained 'junior' professionals in my own field, I can claim no formal training in education to justify my ability to write a Lojban textbook. Who am I therefore to judge that one reason for working on or learning Lojban is better than another? For that matter, do any of us have the credentials in all these fields to give us that 'right'? I doubt it. Of the people I've talked to in the community, pc seems to come closest to that combination of training and experience. But I haven't heard him claim to know the answer. Still he believes enough to keep working. None of us are qualified to 'invent' a natural language from scratch, something that hasn't truly been completed in recorded history. JCB got us started with his creative spark and determination. As a group we can do what no individual can do, what no individual nor scientific group can define how to do: create a language sufficiently robust that it serves all of the requirements that we assign to language as human beings in society. For this truly is the goal of Lojban. As a research effort, the Loglan/Lojban project has been an oddity, especially for 20th century science. It is being conducted by a team of people, most of whom are neither professionally trained in, nor working in, the fields most relevant to the project (which are linguistics and sociology). Kieran Carroll told me that one thing that inspired him to work on the language was the spirit of volunteers working together to conduct scientific research. We are most of us amateurs, in both senses of the word. We are not 'employees' nor 'entrepreneurs' in that we seek no financial reward for our effort; but furthermore, we work on Lojban for our love of it, and of the concepts and goals that we and others hold for it. Can we ask for a better reason? _______________________________________________________________ From ju'i lobypli #7 - 11-12/1988 In fact, after publication, I found some discussion by JCB on the subject that indicates that he indeed does have an opinion on S-W. The following is an excerpted quote from JCB's Commentaries in The Loglanist 3/3, pp.220-221. It is one of the most revealing of JCB's writings, and I wish that I could print more of it. ...Like the deep grammar hypothesis, what all these "biological substrate" hypotheses announce is the virtual certainty that not all is "culturally determined" in the human language act. But it is also virtually certain that much is. The Whorfian question then becomes, Where is the line to be drawn? Our guess, with Loglan, is that the transformational apparatuses of all languages ... are on the Whorfian side of the line. That is, that they are "culturally determined" in the rather special sense that they are by- products of the rules that we in some (not very clear) sense impose on the symbolic game itself. ... One of these games is language itself. And some of the rules ... seem "obviously" to be invented rules. ... These invented rules, if they exist, have consequences ... for our minds. Huge consequences, if Whorf is right. Trivial ones, if the anti-Whorfian's are right...I reject [the latter]. I believe that it doesn't satisfactorily account for the diversity of the human mental life...not only as between cultures, but ... practitioners of different disciplines. JCB then goes on to state his 'New-Whorfian view' that we are animals, but that we have evolved "the freedom to invent symbolic games, and to play them by invented rules, and so ... to invent our own 'realities'". Hmm! By JCB's hypothesis, our various logical language development efforts are basically the inventing of rules for symbolic games. Is the world of Lojban a different reality than that described by other languages, including other versions of logical language? Of course, the 'game' of language only works if everyone plays by the same rules. Otherwise, there is no communication. I won't go into the philosophical implications of this. Views of Another Outsider - Terry Murphey ... I am impressed by the zeal, effort and organization reflected in your publication. These command respect over and above my regard for Bob (whom I know) and my interest in Nora (whom I would like to meet) and my interest in synthetic languages (I prefer "synthetic" here to either "artificial" or "designed"). Hundreds of hours of effort and much thought have gone into lojban. I would like to keep my subscription up, even though I have no plans to learn lojban. The publication is in English (fortunately for me!) and worth reading in its own right; it's loaded with provocative comments, controversial theories and arcane quibbles - I'm fond of all these. I'll offer a few off-the-cuff comments from an uninformed lojban spectator/non-learner in the belief that a) you would be disappointed if I didn't and b) that you'll take them at face value (limited or none). Perhaps they may offer some limited insight into how an "outsider" views the effort and its strengths and limitations. I'll divide my observations into 3 groups: I. surprising omissions, II. strengths and III. possible problems. I. Surprising omissions. A. Any mention of beauty as a goal in language development. Why did The Lord of the Rings become a "cult classic"? Why are people willing to tolerate a book containing substantial passages, poems and songs in not one, but several languages that NO ONE SPEAKS? Is there a lesson here for a language which hopes for a wider audience? Is lojban singable? Does it ring on the ear? Is poetry possible which makes you want to know that the words mean? also see: Ray Bradbury Lewis Carroll e. e. cummings if you don't like J. R. R. Tolkien. B. Any recognition of the great difficulty nearly all adults face in really learning any new language except by "total immersion" in a society of native speakers (who don't know English). People are lazy. Memorizing isn't fun. All but linguists find grammar dull and syntax duller. Which leads me to... Me espa¤ol es muy malo and I've never been to Spain. C. Any defense of the maligned "hobbyists". What's wrong with hobbyists, for heaven's sake? Many of our greatest scientists and inventors have been hobbyists at heart (Mendel? Darwin? Linneaus? Wright Bros? Edison? The list goes on). Could a tiny trace of intellectual snobbery have afflicted the anti- hobbyists? 3 reasons to learn a new language: . To communicate with native speakers/writers (but virtually all lojbanists speak better English than lojban). . Hope of reward/advancement/employment (not foreseeable for lojban). . Because the language is interesting/beautiful/appealing in its own right (Aha? The much maligned hobbyists lurk here?) A lazy oaf like me is bored by lists of words and grammatical rules. But give me witty aphorisms (with no translation) and a dictionary and I'll look then up in spite of myself like any 7 year old with Captain Avenger's Secret Decoder Ring. Or how about a story with key words or passages in lojban, with translation. I'll bet everyone knows what mithril is, and what Hari Seldon's main ideas were. Make me want to learn the stuff in spite of myself. (But I want entertainment! Maybe I should read Agatha Christie instead.) OAFUS LAZIUS LAWSTUDENTIS D. A break for people who haven't a clue how to pronounce .i .e'o ko fraxu mizu lo ri zu'o palci .and are too lazy to consult their pronunciation guides. I could at least have a go at the above but pacyzu'e xrani or cevzda make my tongue twitch just reading them. If each issue contained a few lines with English style pronunciation guides, I would get a notion how they are supposed to sound. How would "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" or "I have a dream" SOUND in lojban? (xkzyl p'mutli? Heelllp!) II. Strengths. A. The 3rd full paragraph on page 51 (6 ju'i lobypli 51 in "law cite" style) has much to recommend it. B. Any activity that can draw so many interesting & intelligent people clearly has quite a lot going for it. III. Possible problems. A. Will people who are interested in the "ground floor" issues of fundamental design/development be interested in the "spadework" of filling in spaces after all the "big" decisions have been made? (The fun stuff is done. I'm outta here!) B. Will conflicting utopian goals (world language - improved thought - Sapir-Whorf) cause schisms? Can this be prevented? "My utopia can beat up your utopia!" C. A "natural" language evolves. When "automobiles" were rare, a long word for them was fine; when "cars" became common a shorter substitute emerged. Will this happen to lojban? Will lojban purists/fundamentalists try to stop it? A shoe will never be a lower appendage protector except to a bureaucrat. I hope no one was terminally offended by the foregoing and that the humble observations of a juxre lojbo will not occasion too much derision. ___________________________________________________ Bob replies: I.A. Beauty is a cultural phenomena, and there are no quantitative standards for it. I like the sound of it. My only problem is the large number of sibilants and fricatives (c, j, s, and z) that cause my tongue to twist a bit. This is an artifact of the Chinese input into the words, since they have a lot of varieties of these sounds. They also use the sound of /n/ a lot, too; that this came across into Lojban as well makes it possible for me to speak it. As to singability - try my poem this issue or my translation of La Paloma a couple of issues back. And I'm not a Tolkien. 1.B. We are constantly aware of this problem. It is part of the reason why Donald Harlow might be right in saying Lojban has problems getting a foothold in the U.S. The U.S. in particular has a lot of lazy people. People in other cultures do not have the problems learning languages that Americans do. 'Primitive' Africans may learn dozens of tribal languages in their lifetimes. It is, indeed, impossible to learn a language without memorizing. You have to memorize far less to speak Lojban than probably any other language there is. Grammar is dull, I agree - but playing with semantics causes Terry Murphey to drool with delight. In Lojban, a little grammar makes for a lot of semantic fun, since the grammar doesn't interfere with the semantic quibble you love. 1.C. Who is knocking hobbyists? I don't know any professional language designers - do you? We are all hobbyists in Lojbandia (ugh! any better ideas for our hypothetical country to replace 'Loglandia'). I've given you things to try and read - though we don't have a true dictionary yet. We are slowly but surely building the capability to produce at least a translator's word list. You'll have to stick with those dry word lists for now. If you memorize them, you won't need to find them in your closet. One thing about the hobbyists you mention - they all took their hobby seriously. You can be quite entertained by Lojban if you learn enough of it to 'play'. If you sit on the outside and spectate, it is like watching a golf game when you don't play the game (or a foreign film without subtitles, in a language you don't recognize). 1.D I've added in pronunciations for some of the translations. For your requests: /ge,nai ko SHPE,du loi TAR,mee noi le,do GUG,de shu SEE,ju do gee ko SHPE,du loi TAR,mee noi do SEE,ju le,do GUG,de/ genai ko cpedu loi tarmi noi ledo gugde cu sidju do gi ko cpedu loi tarmi noi do sidju ledo gugde /mee RAN,zhee pa NUL,sne/ or /mee RAL,te pa SEL,sne/ mi ranji pa nulsne or mi ralte pa selsne depending on how you interpret the quote. 'I continue at a single dreaming.' is the first. The second is 'I retain one thing that is dreamed.' III.A That's all there is left to do, and that is what we are doing. The big decisions were nearly all made by JCB 30 years ago. The spadework is in some ways more fun than the big decisions. I don't have to worry about making mistakes that will doom the language to non-speakability. Our work, and those who help at it, has only positive rewards at this point. III.B So far, no. I doubt it in the future. The only schisms that have occurred so far have been in the domain of individual vs. community 'ownership' and control of the language. For Lojban, the community, with all of its various ideals, owns and controls the language. The work involved in redoing the engineering and teaching materials, once we finish them, will make a schism unlikely. Too much of that spadework, without the certainty of reward. And if the mainstream language is good enough, you have to convince people to join the schism. We believe Lojban is much better than the previous language versions, but if JCB had met the community's needs and desires, it would never have gotten started. III.C. Not likely to be a problem. As I've discussed, the problem is to stop evolution long enough to build a speaking base. Language change is a universal. One might as well try to stop the tides. Your closing tanru means 'costly producer'. I think you meant nu cupra jdima. The other one was quite good, and has a pleasing ambiguity - in calling yourself a kind of lojbo, what properties about yourself are you inferring as being Lojbanic? ____________________________________ The following article, by logic and philosophy professor Todd Moody, may be useful to those who want to know how Lojban compares with other artificial languages. ___________________________________________________ Lojban in Perspective by Todd Moody Lojban, whatever else it may be, is a fascinating project. It represents at once some old and new ideas within what Andrew Large calls the "artificial language movement," in his book of the same name (Basil Blackwell: 1987). For example, it partakes of both a priori and a posteriori characteristics. In the jargon of artificial, or planned, languages, an a priori language is one that is constructed around some central set of philosophical principles, instead of being modeled on existing languages. An a posteriori language, on the contrary, takes one or more existing languages as its model, and aims to "improve" upon them in certain ways. Needless to say, no planned language can be entirely a priori a posteriori. Even an a priori language, for example, must look to existing languages to discover the actual functions of language. And each "improvement" found in an a posteriori language is likely to be based upon certain philosophical principles. Still, these terms are useful, if not precise. Esperanto, for example, is clearly an a posteriori language, in that almost all of its lexical material is drawn from existing languages, mainly French, German and English. Its grammar, though simplified and regularized to a great extent, closely resembles the grammars of other European languages. Zamenhof did not hesitate to refer to the familiar "parts of speech" in his early writings on Esperanto. He was evidently unaware that these concepts do not always have clear counterparts in non-Indo- European languages. Zamenhof's naivete may be striking, but it should be remembered that although he wanted Esperanto to be a neutral language, the sort of neutrality that he wanted was political, not linguistic. Esperanto is not the cultural property of any nation, not a "national" language at all. Many critics of Esperanto, however, have charged that Esperanto is not truly politically neutral because of the extent to which it is clearly not linguistically neutral. It may not be a national language, but it is surely a European language, they complain. This charge obtains its force from the undeniable fact that there is no clear line of demarcation between linguistic non-neutrality and political non- neutrality. I happen to think that Esperanto can, to some extent, be defended against these charges, but this is clearly not the place to do it. The purpose of these observations is to point out the built-in risks to any a posteriori language. There have been numerous a priori planned languages proposed. These have generally involved some classificatory schematism which would allow the names for things to be derived from the metaphysical category in which the things belong. A recent attempt is the language "aUI," which I would venture to guess is unknown to most who will read this. aUI is interesting enough to warrant a brief description. The language aUI was created by W. John Weilgart, late of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Weilgart held doctorates in psychology and philology, from Munich and Heidelberg, respectively. Originally, aUI was intended to be used as an aid in psychotherapy. The idea was to ask people to represent their difficulties in this language, forcing them to reconceptualize and, ultimately, to overcome them. aUI begins with an alphabet of some 31 symbols. These symbols are in fact ideograms, but Weilgart also provided a system for using the Roman alphabet. The main thing is that each letter of the aUI alphabet represents a basic aUI concept. Thus, aUI words are spelled according to what they mean. Alternatively put, each phoneme is a morpheme. Lower-case 'a' (pronounced as in "mama") means "space." Upper-case 'A' (a similar sound, but longer, like the 'A' in "fAther") means "time." The letter 'U' as in "lUnar") means "mind," and 'I' (as in "machIne") means "sound." Thus, the word "aUI" itself means "space-mind-sound." Well, "mind-sound" is an aUI word for "language" so, more idiomatically, "aUI" means "language of space." Weilgart saw aUI as a kind of language of the cosmos. And so it goes. Clearly, the lexical material of aUI will bear no non- coincidental resemblance to any other language. Translated into Esperanto, "aUI" is "spaclingvo." This kind of a priori language is only as good as its classificatory scheme, obviously. If you can't classify things properly, you can't derive words for them. I can't comment on the success or failure of aUI in this regard, although Weilgart did produce a dictionary of several thousand aUI words. Others may judge how well he succeeded in his project. It is fair to say, however, that philosophers have mostly abandoned hope of devising an exhaustive classificatory schema for everything there is. We know better than to expect that all people will find any given system "natural" or complete, or even adequate. We certainly know better than to suppose that classification is an activity that is somehow above or beyond cultural arbitraries. This brings me, finally, to lojban. Where does it fit into this taxonomy of planned languages? My answer, based as it is upon a very rudimentary grasp of the language's central ideas, is that lojban leans toward the a priori end of the spectrum. First, consider the lexical material. It is produced by algorithm, using the most widely spoken existing languages as a source. This, on the face of it, is an a posteriori move. Still, the lojban gismu are essentially composites, not copies. Classically, a posteriori languages such as Esperanto attempt to find the most "international" lexical material and copy it into the language, adapting it to the new orthography. Esperanto borrows words more or less intact; lojban borrows them in order to change them substantially. I have no data on the recognizability of lojban words for various language populations, but my guess is that in no population would it be very high. By subjecting lexical material to its statistical and morphological constraints, lojban puts-- to borrow a politically fashionable word these days--a strong a priori "spin" on a basically a posteriori approach. Where lojban shows its true a priori stripes, though, is in its syntax and semantics. Although I have not in any sense mastered these, what is clear from the outset is that lojban is modeled upon the predicate calculus, or quantificational logic. Predicate logic, suitably enhanced, is the scaffold upon which the language is built. I say "suitably enhanced" because predicate logic alone is clearly not going to do the job, not even with a large dictionary of predicates and arguments. To take a trivial example, the English words "and" and "but" differ in meaning, even though they are both used as truth-functional conjunctions (and "even though" is another). Sentences that differ only in these words will have the same truth conditions, but different meanings. Simple predicate logic makes no distinction between them. As far as it is concerned, they are equivalent. Indeed, it would be fair to say that predicate logic was developed as a tool to help analyze and keep track of certain relations between propositions, and so to screen out other factors. That is, predicate logic is useful precisely because it is not a complete language, but only the abstraction of certain aspects of one. I have taught courses in formal logic more than once, and I have been guilty of referring to logic as the "skeleton" of language, as if it were somehow encased in language, waiting until the twentieth century to be extracted. It's a pretty thought, but quite silly. It suggests that logic is somehow more important than other aspects of language, that it somehow holds everything together. As far as I can see, such thoughts have no basis. We need to consider what language is for, and what we do with it. The adequacy of any given planned language must be judged on how well it does what a language is supposed to do, rather than on how well it reflects our favorite aspect of language. If lojban is in fact a "logical language," that is in itself neither a virtue nor a vice. We use language to perform speech acts. Alternatively, speech acts are the things that we do by means of language. Some speech acts have English names. Examples of speech acts are: insulting, promising, lying, cajoling, threatening, assenting, demurring, slighting, and so forth; the list is long. The successful performance of speech acts requires a certain amount of standardization, so that the listener can recognize, or make a good guess at, the speaker's intentions. Speech acts are, to some extent, culture-bound. There is no reason to expect a one-to-one correspondence between speech-acts across languages. In plainer English, different populations may use language to do different things. So, specific languages are embedded in cultures, and the features of languages will naturally be adapted to the efficient achievement of the speech acts that are important. To take an example, the Japanese language is very simple in certain respects, but it has a rather elaborate and complex system for representing levels of politeness and social standing. It seems fair to say that this system makes possible a number of speech acts that could be accomplished in English only with a certain amount of difficulty and awkwardness, if at all. It is tempting to conclude, therefore that an artificial language--any artificial language--simply misses the point, because there is no super-cultural set of speech acts for such a language to hook onto. This, I think, is a mistake, for two reasons: First, it seems likely to me that there is a set of speech acts approximately common to all languages, even though it may be a subset of the speech acts available in any given language. Second, this conclusion overlooks the considerable ability of people to improvise speech- acts. I believe that language use inevitably involves a substantial amount of improvisation. A useful international language, therefore, will be flexible enough to support this improvisation. It will give people the room to do the things that they need to do. If the language forces people to focus too much of their attention on other details, they will find it difficult and tiresome to use the language. To a certain extent, we all go through this phase when we learn any second (or third) language. We find that our attention is caught up in grammatical details and that, until we have "mastered" them, using the language is exhausting. So, an optimum international language will offer the resources for performing speech acts while minimizing details that are not particularly relevant to them. I simply do not know how lojban would measure up, according to these criteria. It is possible that lojban's isomorphism to predicate logic may, in the end, be little more than a distraction and a nuisance. As a teacher of the subject, I know that formal logic does not come "naturally" to many people, and the reason for this may simply be that it is for the most part extraneous to the successful performance of speech acts. The members of the Logical Language Group need to ask themselves why it is important, or desirable, for a language to be "logical," in the sense in which lojban purports to be a logical language. If the primary purpose of lojban is to serve as a neutral international language, then this fact must figure prominently in any attempt to answer this question. The linguist Otto Jespersen was much involved in the artificial language movement. He was familiar with Esperanto, and later became president of the organization that formed to support Ido, the variant of Esperanto that was created under circumstances that are sometimes described as "schismatic." Even later, he was the author of yet another artificial language project, called "Novial." He offered the following utilitarian principle for assessing planned languages: The best language is the one that offers the greatest ease of learning to the greatest number of people. On the basis of this principle, for example, he criticized Esperanto's compulsory "agreement" of adjectives and nouns. It make sense to ask whether lojban's logical character--the fact of its being modeled on predicate logic--conduces to the greatest ease of learning for the greatest number. This is an empirical question, and I do not know the answer. My guess, based upon my teaching experience, is that lojban's logical structure will make it harder, not easier, for most people to learn. But that is only a guess. So, if we accept Jespersen's rule for assessing planned languages, the first thing to find out is whether lojban deviates in principle from it. As for the issue of lojban's neutrality, Ralph Dumain has already made the point that predicate logic is not, in any real sense, "culturally neutral." On the contrary, it is the highly sophisticated artifact of the scientific culture that originated within European culture. Predicate logic was developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an accompaniment to the positivistic worldview that was also achieving ascendancy at the time. That is, there was a distinct cultural need to find a formalization fo the language of science and mathematics and to provide a basis for the unification of these disciplines. Principia Mathematica was not written just for the hell of it. Naturally, Esperanto is equally susceptible to these criticisms based on neutrality. It may turn out that neutrality is a red herring. I want, therefore, to register these notes of (I hope) constructive skepticism about lojban as an international language. I still find it a fascinating project, as I stated at the outset, and I am very interested in seeing where it goes. ___________________________________________________ Bob replies: Lojban is not necessarily intended to be an international language, though it is an 'artificial' one. Todd occasionally uses the two concepts such that they seem interchangeable, which they aren't. The 'logical' of Lojban is not especially relevant to Lojban's promise as an international language. I have rarely used the logical connectives when I do speak the language; this is partially due to the fact that I was a dunce in logic class (my only 'D' in college, primarily because I couldn't get into doing the homework), and partially because I don't yet know the cmavo that well. When I take time to look them up, I do fine. But logical connection is apparently not necessarily a part of conversation. The first significant Whorfian effect of a logical language might be that people don't imply a logical connection unless they really want one. The other part of the 'logical', the predicate grammar, is simply different, not necessarily hard to learn. I don't know of anyone who has had real trouble with the concept given a little explanation. In addition to its grammar, Lojban is definitely a priori in its words, given Todd's definition. We presume that everything can be covered as compounds of the classification scheme implied by the gismu. The difference with Lojban is that we don't claim that the classification scheme is optimal. There is redundancy in the gismu; there may even be a few gaps that will eventually have to be filled in - though not many. We haven't, though, tried to impose a system on the universe like most a priori languages have. Instead, we have tried to broaden gismu flexibility so that multiple approaches to classifying the universe are possible. Our rule is that any word have one meaning, not that any meaning have one word. There is no 'proper' classification scheme in Lojban. The use of existing languages is not an attempt to make Lojban seem a posteriori. It is part of our solution to the 'ease of learning' problem. The rest of the solution is Lojban's ability to accommodate the structures of other languages. For example, English speakers can use Lojban's SOV and AN order easily. French speakers can use NA if they choose. Speakers of languages with other orders are also able to easily use the language, though their utterances might be somewhat different than those of native English speakers. They will still be understandable to any Lojban speaker. Esperanto (and English) speakers must phrase their sentences in particular ways which are more comfortable for Europeans than for non-Europeans. That Lojban is presumably no harder for a Chinese speaker to learn than for an English speaker (possibly easier - they are used to the concept of tanru, and Lojban's nominal method of asking questions resembles the Chinese) is Lojban's major reason to aspire to be an international language. Todd's comments on non-truth-functional conjunctions caused us to rethink the matter. These have been carried in prior versions of the language by modal operators, causal operators, and discursives. Based on Todd's insights and some of Jim Carter's concepts, Athelstan and I worked up a more systematic approach to discursives, and I was able to tackle the modals and causals myself. The machine grammar work helped simplify things further. The result is that all of these can be used as connectives, but are optional. You can use bare predicate logic, or more colorful connections. It will just be clear which you are doing at any given time. Incidentally, one of the few things we haven't yet tried to accommodate are the Japanese social forms Todd mentions. This is example of a possible use for the 'experimental cmavo' I mentioned above. These cmavo can also be used for unofficial 'local' purposes, as long as it is recognized that they are unofficial and optional. If adopted, they will remain optional. This is an example of a change that might show up after the five-year baseline. I think I will leave it to an eventual Japanese Lojbanist to develop the approach, though. You are correct that Lojban is not neutral with regard to scientism, as I said. We have to be aware of the biases we build into the language in designing and testing it. ____________________________________ From ju'i lobypli #7 - 11-12/1988 Note that embedded footnote comments from Bob LeChevalier are NOT well-marked in this unformatted text, causing them to break up Don Harlow's writing. Underscores at the beginning of a line mark a footnote following. An Esperantist Comments Donald Harlow is Editor of a (The?) nationwide Esperanto newsletter. He supplied me with much of my information that I used last issue to rebut the Anglan argument. Mr. Harlow is very skeptical of Lojban's potential for success. His comments: __________________________________________________ I want to thank you for sending me a copy of the August issue of Ju'i Lobypli. Most of it, I fear, is of little interest to me, but the section pp. 30-52 had quite a bit of meat in it - at least from the point of view of those of us who consider language to be a social rather than a linguistic phenomenon.1 Let me first comment on a couple of points Doug Loss raises, particularly in his second and third paragraphs on p. 37. Volapuk did not dialectize in the sense he suggests; there were a few spin- off languages, but by and large its adherents either abandoned the whole idea or converted to Esperanto (the first two Esperanto clubs, in Nurnberg, Germany, and Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, started life as "world language" - i.e., Volapuk - clubs; both, as Esperanto clubs, are celebrating their 100th anniversaries this year). Esperanto, too, did not "dialectize." There were a number of spin-off languages, but with the exception of Ido, none of them ever acquired a body of speakers (also with the exception of Ido, none of those mentioned by Doug was a spin-off of Esperanto, as you may recognize from having read chapter 3 of my manuscript). Ido, of course, was a deliberate attempt to "reform" Esperanto by moving it closer to the Western European linguistic "norms" of this century; at its apogee in the nineteen twenties it had about 10% the number of adherents of Esperanto. Having attended meetings of several American Esperanto groups for quite a number of years, I cannot help sympathizing with Doug for having had to attend one (or more). They can indeed be lifeless, boring, and generally avoidable, even for somebody who speaks the language. They do have their moments, however, as at one meeting of the San Francisco group when one of our local Sovietophiles ____________________ 1But language is more than just a social or a linguistic phenomenon; it is first and foremost a means of communication. Most Lojbanists have no particular interest in linguistics or languages, and our geographical dispersion tends to negate any active interest in socializing in the language. The 75-member DC- area community, and the 45-member Boston-area community may, with the first classes in the language, also mark a change in this situation. However, I doubt that most Lojbanists are primarily motivated by social reasons to be interested in the language. It attracts people's attention due to its intellectual opportunities - the desire to think new thoughts and to see the world in a way that it has never been seen before. and an Esperanto-speaking Soviet emigre took each other on like Kilkenny cats. From my experiences abroad (London, Shanghai, Suzhou), Esperanto clubs elsewhere are much more lively, and I sympathize with Doug for never having attended one of those. Ralph Dumain's article raises may interesting points, some of which are highly debatable, other of which (at least to me) seem almost self-evident for those with eyes to see. Sapir-Whorf, as Ralph says, is out of favor in America today, but his does not automatically make it wrong; I myself have a soft spot for it. Doug refers to "the fashion in linguistic theories," and Ralph supports this view by listing the various fashions that have come and gone in the last few years. My own opinion is that much of Chomskyism is simply a linguistic refection of the Liberal revolution of the fifties, just as Darwinian "survival of the fittest" is to some extent a reflection of Darwin's social milieu, the cutthroat capitalism of early industrial-age Britain. It is hardly surprising that Chomsky is also known for his left-wing political writings (e.g. American Power and the New Mandarins). Sapir-Whorf is, to some extent, supported by more recent work, such as that of Shinoda in Japan. One term Ralph uses - scientism - reflects a situation which I find as abhorrent as he does, but which you seem to accept as not only unavoidable but desirable. "Scientism," to my way of thinking, is just another religion, this time one that enthrones a certain pattern of thought ("scientific method") at the expense of all others. It is fundamentally a result of the dogmatization of the Age of Reason, and is far too prevalent today.2 Your comments in response to Jeff Kegler certainly hit the mark! The status of English in the world today is an interesting subject, and one we could go on about for hours. When I was in college, and a relatively new Esperantist, people used to point out to me three third-world countries, none of which had ever been a colony (at least officially...), in which English was used almost as a second official language. These were Ethiopia, Iran and Thailand. Where is English in Ethiopia and Iran today? A sidelight on this question in his PBS series "Africa," Ali Mazruhi attributed the unusual (for Africa) political stability of Tanzania to the fact that the first president, Julius Nyerere, opted to make Swahili rather than English the national language, thus enfranchising millions of people who would otherwise have been excluded from the political process. Other African countries, using English or French or Portuguese, remain under the control of a European-trained elite, with the great mass of the people completely unable to participate - a situation conducive to revolution, coups d'etat and the like. ... 1) Esperanto got its start in a milieu conducive to success: 19th century Central Europe, a region in linguistic ferment, where the language problem was not just an intellectual exercise but an everyday phenomenon: at best irritating, at worst catastrophic, for the individual. The United States is not such a milieu, nor was it in 1887; had Zamenhof invented his language here, it is unlikely that it would ever have attained any degree of success. (There have been a number of language projects invented in the United States; none of them, including well-funded and well-publicized Interlingua, ever went anywhere.) Lojban, whatever its other qualities, is an American invention.3 ____________________ 2I noted last issue that 'scientism' is unavoidable as a bias in Lojban, and Todd Moody reiterates that above. In fact, it is the basis for its existence. To dislike 'scientism' would inherently tend to cause one to dislike, or at least to distrust, its results. You and I will have to be on opposite sides of the fence on this one. Personally, I think this country has too much of an anti-science bias, and it is killing us in international competition. I was trained in a school that emphasized merging scientism and humanism, or at least worked to bring about better communication between the two, a la C. P. Snow. But these are just my opinions, and I am not the community. Lojban, unlike Esperanto (as you have described it to me), has no ideology - no single cultural or social goal that drives it. If it did, that ideology would be just the sort of cultural bias we are trying to avoid and we would be doomed before we start. 3Funding and publicity do not make a language successful. There must be something that the language offers that cannot be obtained elsewhere and easier. Esperanto offers a large existing community. Lojban offers a new world of thought. However, given a good language, funding and publicity can spread it farther and faster. If there is one thing America knows how to do, alas, it is 2) Esperanto of 1887 consisted of a few simple rules and about 800 word- roots, this gave the language a simple, attractive flexibility. Zamenhof requested people to promise to learn to speak it when certain conditions were fulfilled, within a year, several hundred people had, on their own, actually learned the language, to the point at which they were writing literature in it. Loglan/Lojban appears to be undergoing definition down to the last dot on the i and cross on the t. Since its initial Going Public (1960), it does not appear to me that anybody has actually learned to speak it. Could this be partially due to grammatical over-rigidity?4 3) Finally, there seems to me to be a fundamental difference between the Esperantist world-view and that of the Loglanists. Loglanists, or so it seems to me from your newsletter (and that of JCB), are more interested in the language as an end in itself; Esperantists, starting with Zamenhof and coming right down to the present, are more interested in the language as a means to an end, i.e. communication. We want to be able to talk with each other; you, I fear, are more interested in the means than the end. Where you look at "cultural neutrality" in terms of technical features of the language, we look at it in terms of how we behave toward each other. Naturally, there are exceptions ____________________________________________________________ to advertise. By the way, for all its supposed publicity, I never heard of Interlingua until I had been long involved in this language effort. Most such languages are publicized only among the community of those interested in linguistics and cultural exchange. Our efforts with Lojban are primarily to identify new subcultures that are not traditionally interested in languages, and convince them of the value of the language. If we can do this successfully, the traditional language-oriented groups will naturally follow. Unlike Interlingua, Lojban is coming to fruition at an ideal time (though we almost missed it). The U.S. is starting to become aware of the language problem (there would be no interest in making English 'official' otherwise), we are being affected by it in international competition. And of course, the computer revolution has reached the point where meaningful language processing is possible in real time. I feel that Lojban is a better way to go in developing methodologies for computer processing of language. 10 or 20 years from now, some other solution will have been found if Lojban doesn't fit the bill. 4The 1960 going public was not comparable to 1887 in Esperanto, but more like 1879. In the International Language Review, he promised a more complete language description in 'a couple of years'. The 1975 Going Public failed because there was no follow-through. JCB failed to let go of the language, and yet could not push it along enough by himself. However, people did learn to speak it; more used it to write in. These people immediately used their knowledge to try to improve it. The changes that came about almost immediately caused everyone who came along later to be lost. A speaking community never developed because there were never more than a few people in any area that had material on the language. No one other than JCB could take the lead because he has never published enough description of the language that anyone could master it enough to teach others. (Scott Layson did however, manage to teach a couple of people, as did JCB himself.) The rigidity of definition you worry about is Lojban's strength, not its weakness. Lojban takes advantage of 100 years more knowledge of linguistics, and what makes a language work than did Esperanto. Lojban's goals also require that definition; otherwise it will become just a strange regularized dialect of English (i.e. Anglan), just as some might say that Esperanto can be said to be a regularized dialect of European. In any case, since Lojban is being developed by more than one person, it is inherently going to take longer. The period from 1975 to 1988 has no corresponding period in Esperanto history; it is the period in which one man's language description was turned into a several hundred person development effort. Since those people were all spare time hobbyists, of course Lojban has taken a long time to come to fruition. We are now in the period of true going public. You should compare 1988 to 1887. We will start carefully, and possibly a bit slower than Esperanto did. We also will be teaching over a much larger geographical area at first than Esperanto. But see where we are in a year or two. Better yet. I note from the material you sent me that Esperanto really started to catch on around 1907, when it was 20 years old. See where Lojban is in 2008, instead of writing us off before the fact. in both camps; but the two tendencies definitely seem to be observable. The result, I think, is that Loglan/Lojban may well appeal to those who have an interest in the technical aspect of linguistic engineering; Esperanto will remain the constructed language of choice for those who are more interested in the practical side of things.5 [Excerpt of letter from Donald Harlow to pc]: The developments of the period 1887-1889 are far more enigmatic, and it is here that I see the greatest potential for contrast between the intrinsic qualities of Esperanto and those of Loglan. The situation for Esperanto vis-a- vis Volapuk in 1887 was very similar to that of Loglan vis-a-vis Esperanto in 1988; the first was an interloper, without a speaking population, while the second had a well-defined speaking community scattered across the world (Volapuk societies existed in places as disparate as Indonesia and the American Wild West), and if the question of an international language was not definitely settled, almost all aficionados agreed that the question of the constructed candidate was. Nevertheless, the publication of Esperanto in 1887 was quickly followed by the spontaneous development of what you call a "community". The book contained a minimal grammar, about eight hundred words in its vocabulary, and only six examples of how to use the language (three of them were poems); yet two months later Zamenhof opened his front door to find, to his surprise, the first other Esperanto speaker waiting on his front porch to converse with him - in Esperanto! He was quickly followed by others, and by the time of the appearance of the second book, and its supplement, in early 1888, there was already a respectable speaking population, not only in what is now Poland but in other parts of the northwestern Russian Empire as well, and in the Hohenzollern Empire. International language support groups, formerly Volapukist, in several diverse locations went over to Esperanto (in Nurnberg, Germany, and Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria); and the first strictly Esperantist group was founded in St. Petersburg. The first Esperanto literature appeared in the same year (Grabowski's translation of a work by Pushkin), and in 1889 the first magazine appeared - at first in French, German and Esperanto, but by the second issue strictly in Esperanto - to provide the nascent community with an institution of its own.6 By contrast, Loglan - which apparently first went public in the early 1960's and has a very well-developed corpus of didactic and lexicographic material - has apparently generated no spontaneity whatsoever.7 There is little ____________________ 5Since Esperanto already has a world community, it can afford to be concerned with using the language for the purpose it is intended. Lojban has to build its community first, or there will be no one to talk to. We can't start until we have our '1887 book', which I'm just about to start on. But don't think we aren't interested in using the language, just because we aren't yet. I think a lot of the frustration in our community has been from people who are tired of waiting to use the language. That is why la lojbangirz exists. With our organized planning effort, Lojban will be able to make it, in spite of the handicaps you've mentioned - and it will be stronger afterwards. You are right, however. If you want to talk to someone right now in another country, you cannot use Lojban; you might be able to use Esperanto. This is why we will get our teaching materials translated into Esperanto as soon as we are able. 6If I am to believe my correspondents (and I do), I don't expect anyone to easily teach themselves the language until the textbook is written and, for many, until they have tapes to listen to. Esperanto was close enough to the local tongues that it could be self-taught from 6 examples. In effect, the people learning Esperanto were using all of their native tongue as an example. Lojban can't do this; moreover, in trying to achieve cultural neutrality we don't want it to. We want people to learn the language as something new. This may prove difficult, but that doesn't mean we can't succeed. 7What corpus are you referring to? There has been scattered short translations and a very small amount of original writing in the language. L1 has no text longer than individual sentences stilted to demonstrate a single point. As a result, the people who have studied the language until now generally haven't been able to write more than individual sentences using a few individual grammatical features, though many can do this quite well - see Jack Waugh's if any speaking population, and what verbal exchanges have occurred in Loglan appear to be forced - an attempt to give the language a tradition, rather than an attempt to use the language for non-linguistic purposes. Few if any individual Esperantists have shown interest in Loglan, and no Esperanto groups have done so.8 There appears to be no spontaneously generated literature, and all the periodical literature I've seen in Loglan appears to be exclusively in English. I'm not qualified to try to explain this difference in results in purely linguistic terms. I have never studied Loglan. Perhaps you have some explanation? ____________________________________________________________ letter for an example. Most of the material published in The Loglanist was torn to shreds by JCB as examples of the language. And JCB himself, while he may have written considerable material in the language, has never evidenced this in publication. This is why JCB's revision to L1 is going to be insufficient to teach the language (unless he is doing a lot more than he has indicated in publication). By the way, nothing from before 1982 has been particularly useful corpus for people still following JCB's version of the language. People have chosen not to deal with the ever-changing target that period provided. The language has been more stable since, but with no current description, there has been nothing to learn. You are wrong about the spontaneity, by the way. There were lots of attempts by people to communicate in the language. They all went to JCB. They all stopped there. A few were published in The Loglanist, as I said, but they were sparse indeed. Jim Carter, however, wrote dozens of pages, including a full Loglan Primer, with an original story composed in it. JCB attacked Carter (because the language did not match JCB's standard) and those who aided his publication during the 1984 politics, and the material was never widely circulated. (We will be updating the story to match Lojban's vocabulary - probably for use in the textbook, with Jim Carter's encouragement.) But of course the best evidence of spontaneity developing is the Lojban effort itself and la lojbangirz. As Nora and I and the others who are finally free to use the language do so, you will no doubt see an outpouring of material in the language. Just don't expect it by next issue. I can't type that fast. 8I suspect there are a number of Esperantists, or attempted Esperantists at least, among the community. Esperanto Centrist Bruce Arne Sherwood has written articles comparing the language to Esperanto and others, though he hasn't learned the language to my knowledge. Why would Esperanto groups be interested in Lojban any more than any other group? Neither JCB nor I have made any attempt to woo Esperantists, either as a group or as individuals. Our anti- competitive thrust, and our focus on drawing members of non-language communities suggests that this won't be a high priority for us. _________________________________ The following is unpublished rebuttal to Bob LeChevalier's and others comments in ju'i lobypli #6 on 'Why Lojban?', and in particular reponses to Ralph Dumain's essay in that issue. From Ralph Dumain ... I was surprised and gratified to see my essay on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis published in full, uncensored. Naturally, I was disappointed in your printed response, but I must congratulate you on your procedural openness and fairness. I regret that you painted me as an enemy of Loglan/Lojban ... After I received your last newsletter, I immediately set out to defend myself and sketched a lengthy response to both your comments and other formulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in that newsletter. And then I proceeded on to more positive efforts, expanding on all aspects of the question of the relation of language to thought, a question which encompasses a number of research traditions and problems. One such endeavor is an elaboration of my view that semantics, not syntax, is responsible for substantive cognitive bias in languages. Another is the nature of standard languages and the issues involved in much sociolinguistic research of the 1960s which addressed itself to the question of whether nonstandard English, in the form of working-class British dialects or Black English, carries along with it inherent cognitive limitations in its speakers. I have formulated my own version of how the ability to form abstractions and formulate world-views interacts with standard and nonstandard language and prior intellectual traditions. In the process of doing all this, I have generated an interesting short bibliography drawn from a number of research specialties that illuminates the key issues in questions of linguistic, cognitive, and metaphysical biases and limitations. Despite the sarcastic tone and intellectual impatience of my published essay, it is wrong to draw the conclusion that my essay was essentially nihilistic in character. In fact, I was attempting to define what the real linguistic issues are, what problems Loglan/Lojban has to face in demonstrating its relevance to the concerns of linguists, to emphasis the revolution in the understanding of grammar that renders problematic many of Whorf's speculations in the 1930s and 1940s, and to focus attention on semantics rather than syntax as the key issue in cognitive bias. (Whorf dealt with both syntax and semantics, and it was semantics rather than syntax that proved to be the most reasonable and productive line of inquiry.) Of course, I remain unconvinced that any Loglanists have seriously thought out the issue of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, based on what I have already read. Beyond defending, paraphrasing, and explaining what I have already written, I think your readers will be interested in some of my more positive endeavors mentioned above, and my bibliography in progress will be very useful to those interested in larger intellectual issues. Dealing with these issues in the Lojbanist forum intellectually inspired me to pursue ideas that will be of great usefulness to us all. I'm thrilled about that. FURTHER REMARKS ON THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS AND OTHER MATTERS by Ralph Dumain I want to react to some statements in previous issues of Ju'i Lobypli (henceforth abbreviated JL), to give some suggestions about how to think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (henceforth SWH) in a productive manner, and to sketch my ideas for future essays. I trust that the issue of my intent in my previous essay "Some Comments on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Loglan" (JL6) has been cleared up, as the original accusations of nihilism and enmity toward Loglan were dealt with in JL7. I opposed not Loglan per se but the legitimacy of Whorf's doctrine and Loglan's relevance to it. I suggest that those offended by my article and those who think I contradicted myself reread it, more carefully this time. A previous newsletter listed a number of reasons that people might be interested in Loglan, all of which were deemed acceptable. The corollary of that policy ought to be that one has the right to reject any one of those goals as well. A neurotic attachment to a particularly dubious idea or goal on the part of Loglan's chief apologists could damage the prestige of the Loglan effort. There are a number of research programs within linguistics and other social, behavioral, and human sciences (eg. linguistics proper, sociology of language, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, educational policy) which bear on the same issues as SWH. The formulation of the relation between cognitive capacities and limitations and specific forms of language have had real-world, even life-and-death, consequences, and should not be dealt with in an uninformed and superficial manner. The issue is political dynamite, not only when comparing different languages and their purported concommitant cultural and cognitive differences, but when comparing social dialects to the standard language (as in the case of Black English or working-class British dialects) and trying to demonstrate cognitive implications. The issue of language and thought is so multifaceted that intelligent discussion demands a wide intellectual culture on the part of the discussants. To that end, an annotated bibliography in progress compiled by me will appear separately in this newsletter. I will elaborate on SWH further, but first, let me clear up some other misunderstandings. WHAT IS SCIENTISM? I and others have attacked scientism, Bob LeChevalier has defended it, but none of us seem to be using the same definition of the word. One dictionary definition of scientism is the doctrine that the scientific method is applicable to all endeavors and to the resolution of all problems. Even if scientific method were the only true method, it would still have to be used properly, and since it has often has misused (often intentionally), another meaning of scientism has evolved: the attempt to impress others and distort reality by aping procedures of science. In my previous article, I defined scientism on- the-fly as "the appearance of science without the substance." More specifically, scientism is a mystification: the fetishistic use of terminology, notation, quantification, statistics, procedures, etc., to create an illusion of scientific validity. I had no intention of criticizing the scientific method or promoting an anti-scientific attitude. For Don Harlow (JL7, p52), scientism is a dogmatic deification of scientific method to the exclusion of all other modes of knowing. He claims to abhor scientism as much as I do, but it seems that he abhors science, which I do not. (There is nothing like being stabbed in the back by someone who pretends to agree with you.) His contempt of science is evidenced by his attitude toward linguistics: language is a social rather than a linguistic phenomenon (JL7, p51). This is an exceedingly ignorant statement. Language as a total phenomenon is admittedly more than a set of grammatical rules, as all linguists agree, but among other things language indisputably includes a set of rules (phonological and syntactic, for example), some of which are autonomously linguistic in nature and some of which are culturally influenced. Languages may be valued more by people (other than by linguists or poets) for social rather than linguistic reasons, but that is a separate issue altogether. Harlow may be thinking of his experience with Esperanto and of the various arguments for and against Esperanto and other alternatives based on linguistic vs. social arguments. Even those who most value the social aspect must recognize that the admirable humanistic qualities that pervade the Esperanto world are qualities attributable to the community, not to any mystical essence of the language itself, which like other languages has been subject to linguistic analysis. Most Esperanto propagandists have thought thus; only in recent years have degenerate mystical crackpots in the Esperanto movement made their linguistic superstitions respectable. Now, what is the basis for supposing that James Cooke Brown is guilty of scientism in my sense of the word? From the literature available to me (and I am open to revising my judgment after reading more source material), I could not believe that JCB made a serious effort at thinking out his views. Even by the early 1950s others had sufficiently criticized the shortcomings in the conceptualization of SWH. The weaknesses in JCB's reasoning are obvious. (1) The assumption that existing languages set limits on thought must first be substantiated. (2) One ought to justify the contention that modelling a language on predicate logic involves making the smallest possible set of assumptions about the world. (3) One must prove that the grammars of natural languages in fact force certain assumptions about the world, to prove the relevance of (2) to the amelioration of (1). There is an inherent mixup in Brown's thinking between the use of a logical language to (a) facilitate thought and (b) test SWH by purportedly altering metaphysical assumptions. (a) seems logical because we know that other formal devices such as logic and mathematics aid thought. We know that mathematics makes possible knowledge of the world that cannot practically be attained through natural language. When we teach students calculus, we can claim that we are giving them a "language" to facilitate thought, but can we honestly say that we are thereby testing and confirming SWH? What would we prove other than what we already know? What does Loglan really change in language that we can be surreptitiously led from (a) to (b)? There is a quantitative difference: the student of Loglan has to learn a smaller number of grammatical rules. So what? Especially if the grammatical rules of natural language do not commit individuals or cultures to a particular world view as Brown dogmatically presumes? Check out Brown's reasoning in Loglan 1. It is incoherent and barely thought out. Yet it is cast in a scientific mode. The rhetoric of experimentation abounds. So much significance is attributed to the procedures and devices for the construction of Loglan - the a posteriori method for generating an essentially a priori lexicon, the unambiguous parsing of Loglan sentences, the use of predicate logic - that attention is distracted from their importance. If the argument for Loglan's relevance to SWH is bogus, if a whole complex of real issues have been skirted, would not the employment of imposing and seemingly scientific procedures in the construction of the language constitute the very scientism to which I alluded? Although I am impressed by the construction of Loglan, I am not impressed by the supposed relevance of its principles to testing SWH. Of Loglan's distinctive characteristics, I think that only the use of predicate logic has any real bearing on the issue. And perhaps the "logical language" can be used to alter thinking in some way, but in what way, and in what relationship to existing languages - these are the questions. IS PREDICATE LOGIC BIASED? In raising the possibility of philosophical and cultural bias of predicate logic itself, I do not go along with Todd Moody's statement (JL7, p47) that predicate logic is merely the (presumably subjective) creation of modern European scientific culture. I am thinking primarily of philosophical issues: the philosophy of logic, types of logic, relation of formal logic(s) to natural language, relation of formal logic to human reasoning (processes). The cultural issues would be: the valuation of logic in various cultures or in a culture through time, the relation of logic to practical reasoning, rhetoric, and argumentation, and the types of logic favored or disfavored. NOAM CHOMSKY AND MODERN LINGUISTIC THEORIES There has been more contemptible ignorance sputed on this topic than on any other. First of all, the gamut of competing theories, and the different formulations and revisions of generative grammar, cannot be reduced to a single individual. Chomsky has gone through periods of occupying a minority position even within the generative tradition, such as during the late 1960s when Chomsky and his "interpretivist" adherents were outnumbered by the generative semanticists. Secondly, one should at least familiarize oneself with a subject before making patently false statements such as: "Chomsky's theories PRESUME that one can intensively study one language, English, and thereby understand and determine deep structure of all languages" (JL6, p33, paragraph 4). The big lie, proclaimed by some people in various issues of JL (see for example Doug Loss's comments in JL6, p37), is that Chomskyan linguistics is simply a fashion, and therefore SWH is now out of fashion. One can infer that Chomsky is in and Whorf is out for the wrong reasons. More to the point, there is the insinuation that linguists are biased against Loglan presumably because of their adherence to the Chomskyan "fad." Harlow, in complete ignorance of history and linguistics and with arrogant contempt for science, expresses his arbitrary fondness for SWH and portrays Chomsky's linguistics as the reflection of his political radicalism and the "liberal revolution of the 1950s" (JL7, p52). (Is this to be construed as an exercise in red-baiting?) I am no idolator of authorities; in fact, I have an expert knowledge of ideological and political biases, intellectual fads, and pseudoscience in the history of ideas, academe, and "respectable" disciplines. I also happen to know that the Chomskyan revolution was a response to real problems and real inadequacies in the American structuralist tradition. On the other hand, the most faddish, most heavily ideological trend in the history of American linguistics was SWH itself, having dropped down through the century-plus racial- mystical proto-fascist philosophical tradition of German idealism and plopped into the hands of cultural relativist white liberals in America. I stand accused of trying to snow people with erudite arguments (JL7, p. 39), yet both my views and the history of linguistics are falsified by others. I do not expect anyone to accept my statements on my say-so nor to kowtow to any particular linguistic theory or authority, but Loglanists who have scientific pretensions have an obligation to familiarize themselves with linguistics so as to enable a responsible, competent judgment. (How many have bothered to study even the history of the SWH: its evolution, formulation, testing, etc.? I have.) Loglanists should make the effort to learn a little something about modern linguistics to avoid the howlers that have appeared in the newsletter. People who claim to adhere to the scientific method but show indifference if not hostility to the very science that should most concern them do not create a positive impression of their seriousness or sincerity. I would suggest that interested persons begin with the three books of Frederick Newmeyer listed in my bibliography. Among them, they explain the history of linguistic theory in America, clear up popular misconceptions about generative linguistics, and deal with the political and institutional factors favoring and hindering the spread of different kinds of linguistics. Let me emphasize here an important historical fact: Chomsky superseded American structuralism, not SWH. SWH was in no way tied to the structuralist conception of language that generative linguistics supplanted; it constituted a separate research tradition in its own right. Its weaknesses were analyzed long before Chomsky became known. Interest in SWH did not automatically disappear with the popularity of generativism, if for no other reason than the fact that generative linguistics did not do away with other types of linguists, such as anthropological linguists, who did not necessarily lose their concern with the issues raised by SWH. Many anthropological linguists continued to investigate semantic domains (eg. folk taxonomies, kinship systems) and have had, it seems, a different set of problems to solve than the generativists. THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS: STRONG AND WEAK VERSIONS SWH has been subjected to various interpretations. Most important is the distinction between "strong" and "weak" versions of the hypothesis. The weak version acknowledges the possibility that different forms of language will correlate with some cognitive differences. The relevant features of language here are the lexicon (eg. the numerous Eskimo words for snow) and possibly some aspects of morphology (eg. morphemes which would classify entities, eg. shapes of objects). It is not unreasonable to think that such linguistic differences would differentially draw attention to and reinforce habitual attention to distinctions in the environment. This was the only aspect of the Whorf hypothesis that could be clearly conceptualized, hence tested: that having names for things aids in perceptual discrimination, memory, attention, and the like. So experiments were performed using certain semantic domains such as color and shape, with impeachable results. The strong version makes a claim that the structure of language determines and even limits thought, not just reinforcing certain perceptions or apperceptions, but actually influencing, even controlling, world view. Here, Whorf did not limit himself to the semantic structure of the lexicon, but sought proof in grammar, as in his insupportable ontological analysis of the Hopi tense-aspect system. This version of SWH was never formulated in an intelligent way such that it could even make sense, let alone be testable. Only a host of opportunistic popularizers and a few pea-brained anthropologists took it seriously. The strong version was discredited before anyone heard of Chomsky. I have no objection in principle to the notion that the use of Loglan might result in relatively low-level cognitive effects (ie. a weak SWH), which I shall deal with in a future essay. A 'logical language' in use, like formal logic itself, could conceivably affect thought processes. Perhaps the very USE of Loglan, that is, its pragmatics, may be more responsible for cognitive effects than the language itself, since an explicit goal of the Loglan subculture is to consciously cultivate awareness of what happens in communication and the expression of ideas via language and the tacit assumptions, ambiguities, and mismatches of understanding therein. (This has relevance to Parks-Clifford's proposed experiment. I will explain in a future essay.) But a strong claim that Loglan will make any difference in something so high-level as one's world view, I take to be patently preposterous. I am prepared to argue that such a claim, the strong-Whorfian tradition that inspired it, and other programs of language reform as thought reform, share an ideologically and politically tendencious hidden agenda that seeks to disguise bias in social reality under the diversionary guise of combatting bias in language. From what I have read so far, the chief Loglanist propagandists of SWH, whom I take to be Brown, Parks-Clifford, and LeChevalier, are pushing the strong version. LeChevalier promises that Loglan offers a new world of thought (JL7, p51-52). This suggests that LeChevalier in quoting Brown's views agrees with them. Brown's ideas (summarized in JL6, p31-33) are slanted toward the strong- SWH. These assertions are most interesting: (1) the structure of language determines the boundaries of human thought, (2) a logical language such as Loglan is intended to remove limits on thought, (3) Loglan attempts to incorporate the smallest possible set of assumptions about the world, (4) Loglan has reduced the number of assumptions because it has no obligatory tenses, genders, cases, parts of speech, etc. (thus assuming that such items found in natural languages constitute metaphysical assumptions), (5) with Loglan, speakers will be able to express assumptions about the world without being able to impose them on the auditor. I suggest to you that this whole line of reasoning is seriously misconceived. I am intrigued by the notion that customary use of a syntax based on predicate logic (which would be linguistically interesting in its very possibility) rather than on the syntax of natural languages implies DIFFERENCES in cognition, but the idea of metaphysical ASSUMPTIONS and LIMITS is all wrong. In my next essay on this topic, I intend to demolish presumptions (1) and (4) above. Scaffolding a whole research program around unwarranted assumptions centered around superficial aspects of grammar is a big mistake. One must also recognize the difference between a purely syntactically-based effect (eg. expressive and interpretive efficiency of a clearer and more flexible syntax) and effect on the content of utterances. Parks-Clifford also adopts the strong version in his proposals for testing SWH (JL6, p45-46). His assumptions are basically the same as those above: (1) the limits of one's language are the limits of one's world; (2) grammatical categories define the ontological categories of the word; (3) the combinatory potentials of one's language delimit the complexity of one's world. The erroneous assumption of (2) sabotages a serious inquiry into (3). If one is interested in combinatorial possibilities, one must focus on those aspects of language whose combinatorics really count. (3) contains a further philosophical assumption apart from the linguistic aspect, that the creation of novel concepts is a combinatorial, that is a taxonomic, process. This idea echoes back to Leibniz and farther back to Raymond Lull. (Coincidentally, I have worked on essays which attempt to show just how wrong this idea is and how it has been invalidated by four centuries of progress of scientific theorizing, and I will be happy to share my writings upon their completion.) Brown, in addition to a nebulous conception of language and the cultural significance of its various components, also has noteworthy philosophical commitments (quoted by LeChevalier in JL7, p48-49): we have "the freedom to invent symbolic games, and to play them by invented rules, and so... to invent our own 'realities'". I could write a doctoral dissertation on the ideology and sociology behind this statement, as I have made a practice over the past 16 years of carefully scrutinizing people who think that they can invent their own realities and play whatever games they choose. The sociocultural characteristics of the Loglanist community will be greatly affected by the number of its members who think this way. This particular world view has nothing to do with the structure of the English language, as both the proponents and opponents of this world view can be found in all language communities, and when they fight out this issue, they are not fighting on the basis of syntax. Do not think that my endeavor here is purely negative. On the contrary, once naive and mistaken notions are disposed of, we can go on to redefine our research program in a constructive way, which necessitates (1) more sophisticated thinking about natural language, (2) reorientation towards semantics and away from syntax, especially its trivial aspects, (3) reorientation towards a weak SWH. I plan to spell out some constructive ideas along these lines. FUTURE ESSAYS Among my many essay ideas, the first priority is to follow up on the clarification of linguistic ideas, above. I have a lot of material to write, and I tend to take up a lot of space, probably too much. In order to justify the use of space for particular articles, Bob LeChevalier needs to hear from you about your those aspects of my work that interest you most if at all. Here is my plan. A. Linguistic and psycholinguistic issues 1. The priority of semantics and superstitions about grammar 2. Combinatory possibilities in natural language: syntax vs. semantics 3. Do conceptual structures exist within or outside of sentences? 4. Are there limits to thought in natural languages? 5. Weak SWH and Loglan's strengths - Loglan as an aid to thought 6. Speakers' and listeners' assumptions and inferences 7. Linguistic devices for handling polysemy, esp. ideological conflicts in word meanings 8. Automatizations, the stabilization of meaning, the semantic interpretation of unusual syntactic statements 9. Montague grammar and formal semantics 10. World view and the formation of abstract concepts - linguistic and extralinguistic limitations on thought B. Pragmatics of language 1. The sociological-ideological characteristics of the Loglan community and their effects on speech acts and language use 2. Loglan's weakness: cultural/emotional/aesthetic/metaphorical/historical poverty - how does it relate to the Loglan community? Can it be overcome? 3. Extralinguistic effects on the thinking of Loglan users - how to change Parks-Clifford's proposed experiment C. Sociolinguistic aspects of Loglan 1. Loglan as a subculture and antilanguage, and its relation to similar subcultures (eg. science fiction) 2. The embedded ideological-sociological characteristics of the Loglan speech community (eg. social bias of the ideological complex of pluralism, neutrality, openness, free market of realities) 3. Social reinforcement of unprecedented linguistic norms 4. Child Loglan learners and their development 5. Loglan as an autonomous language 6. The sociolinguistic significance of Loglan D. The politics of language reform as thought reform E. Philosophy (esp. of science and logic) 1. Relation of logic to language. Which logic is the logic of language? 2. Logic and world-view: thought as content-driven and sociologically determined 3. Epistemological problems in language 4. Jurgen Habermas on communication and language 5. Combinatorial possibilities and the generation of novel concepts 6. Scientific theories and revolutions vs. the limits of taxonomic thinking 7. Adequate abstraction vs. cybernetic hype: forming an adequate idealization of human cognition and alternative futures BIBLIOGRAPHY WITH COMMENTARY IN PROGRESS ON LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: PART 1 by Ralph Dumain INTRODUCTION The question of the relation of thought to language is a multifaceted one and has been approached by such disciplines as philosophy, linguistics proper, sociology of language, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, and educational policy. This selected bibliography is not representative of the field of language and cognition as a whole, nor of its historical evolution, nor of its most current work, nor of its most significant contributions. I have selected, in a nonsystematic way, works which illustrate the different angles from which the issue must be considered and which illuminate the problems to be confronted. This bibliography reflects my interest in the high-level aspects of language and cognition, eg. the strong version of Whorf's hypothesis [the world view issue], particularly the human ability to formulate and critique concepts. For me, the issue of the ability to form and interrelate abstract concepts is exclusively an issue of semantics. The practical and political issue is the mastery of word meanings and the conquest of the opacity of semantic systems. The most philosophically, sociologically, and politically astute authors listed here superbly criticize the philosophical and ideological problems of certain views of language, but unfortunately these same people tend to be the least knowledgeable about linguistics proper and thus are limited in their ability to form adequate positive notions of the nature of language. Newmeyer gives the best information on the history of modern linguistic theories since Chomsky. In the sociolinguistic and politically sensitive vein, I have neglected to include works by William Labov and Basil Bernstein, two of the foremost researchers of the 1960s on issues of cognitive ability and social dialects. I will have to rectify this omission in the next installment of this bibliography. Bernstein was a pioneer in the comparison of standard English vs. British working class dialects, the formulation of the notions of elaborated and restricted code, and the investigation of different uses of language as social reinforcements. Labov presented a wealth of ethnographic data to prove that ghetto-dwelling Black Americans using so-called Black English were perfectly capable of abstract thinking, refuting assertions to the contrary. Labov also used transformational-generative grammar to analyze the syntax of Black English and to refute superstitions about linguistic deficiency. I am completely on Labov's side in this matter. Superficial notions of language which reinforce shallow cultural stereotypes and facile ideas about world views are politically as well as intellectually dangerous. Besides paying more attention to recent developments in linguistic theory, we will also have to delve into the pragmatics of language more thoroughly, where much of the hidden dynamics of language and social control lie. There is much in the literature of philosophy, especially philosophy of science, that bears upon the tacit assumptions of Loglan ideologists such as Brown and Parks- Clifford about the nature of language, the limits to thought, the role of formal logic, and the nature of creativity and novelty in the progress of thought. Finally, though some of the references below deal with the politics of linguistic determinism, we hope to explore that avenue more thoroughly, especially the politics behind language reform as philosophical reform. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bisseret, Noelle. 1979. Education, Class Language and Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bisseret examines the shortcomings of sociologists of language who analyze class dialects, such as Basil Bernstein. Their key defect is essentialism, the idea that a language variant is a natural expression of a (sub)culture (including family realtionships within it). Such thinking represents a questionable stratificationalist view of society: each social stratum creates its own language variant as its cultural expression, as if each social stratum existed in of and by itself, unrelated to the others. The essentialist view of social dialects ignores the relationship between social classes, which is antagonistic and in which one class dominates another. Bisseret also refuses to think of the standard language as an independent entity, by which progressives could speak of the unequal distribution of linguistic capital. Finally, Bisseret asserts that the logicality and coherence of the world belong to the dominant class. Carroll, John B. 1964. Language and Thought. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, Inc. See chapter 7: 'Language and cognition', esp. the section "The linguistic-relativity hypothesis" (p. 106-110). Carroll is skeptical of the strong Whorfian thesis. Evidence is lacking that grammatical differences between languages signify cognitive differences. He gives examples to show misleading extrapolations based only on linguistic evidence. Carroll uses the expression "dead metaphors" (eg. 'breakfast'). Chomsky, Noam. 1973. See Schaff, Adam. Friedrich, Paul. 1979. Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedrich disagrees with Whorf's views on language and metaphysics, but accepts the strong thesis in the realm of poetic language and its relation to the imagination. Gyekye, Kwame. 1977. "Akan language and the materialist thesis: a short essay on the relation between philosophy and language," Studies in Language, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 237-244. Opposes linguistic relativity in philosophy. Examples are given of mentalistic linguistic expressions in English which are expressed physicalistically in Akan. A linguistic relativist would conclude that the Akan people are materialists, yet Akan ontology is actually dualistic, with an absolute distinction between body and soul. Havranek, Bohuslav. 1964. "The functional differentiation of the standard language," in: A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, selected and translated from Czech by Paul L. Garvin; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press; p. 3-16. On lexical and syntactic aspects of standard vs. folk speech, different modes of utilization of the devices of language, intellectualization, automatization and foregrounding. Intellectualization of language makes possible precision, rigor, and abstractness. Syntactic devices enable an integrated structure of sentences. Automatization is the creation of conventional expressions with definite meanings; once established, an automatization does not attract attention to itself linguistically. Foregrounding is the use of language (usually uncommon) that attracts attention to itself, eg. live poetic metaphor. An expression automatized in one context may be foregrounded in another. Automatizations of science are different from those in conversation. This article is important for two complementary reasons: (1) It proposes requisites of intellectual language, especially the ability to express abstractions, which I believe is the key issue in being able to formulate and change one's world view; (2) automatization, in creating conventional expressions, not only makes possible the expression of concepts, but an automatization as such is no longer metaphorically alive and so no longer binds a thought to its particular linguistic expression (thus negating a putative Whorfian limitation on thought). Foregrounding is relevant to Loglan because as Loglan is entirely new, there are no cliches, no tiresome or worn expressions. Loglan seems poetic to some of its propagandists because the entire language is foregrounded. What might otherwise be banal seems to be exquisitely poetic. Whorf foregrounded Hopi grammar, making it a source of live metaphors for him if not for the Hopi themselves. Jackendoff, Ray. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deals with grammatical constraint, semantic structure and conceptual structure, and theory of representation. This reference is included not as an endorsement of a particular semantic theory but as an example of one of the more sophisicated recent treatments of semantics. Kahane, Henry and Renee. 1984. "Linguistic aspects of sociopolitical keywords," Language Problems and Language Planning, vol. 8, no. 2, p. 143-160. The Kahanes examine the semantics of ideologically loaded words (keywords) and the processes by which they evolve over time. I think that ideological semantic systems create the most crucial biases in language, and so this article is important. Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The authors make an important study of the metaphorical basis of language (eg. dominant = up, subordinate = down). In the final chapters they argue for an extreme relativism, which in my view does not follow from their otherwise useful data. Others have claimed to have found metaphorical universals and have just as inanely argued for the innateness of such universals. Langacker, Ronald W. 1976. "Semantic representations and the linguistic relativity hypothesis," Foundations of Language, vol. 14, p. 307-357. Langacker tries to formulate the hypothesis in a non-vacuous manner, and ultimately rejects the strong version, basing himself on a distinction between primary conceptual structures and the semantic representations into which thought is coded. Two sentences in different languages may be semantically equivalent even when they employ different semantic representations. Semantic representations may not necessarily be universal. Languages may choose different images for encoding equivalent notions. Such means of expression are conventionalized to varying degrees, and speakers may remain unaware of images. This may be true of grammatical markers as well as of lexical items. The figurative character of morphemes may disappear and along with it semantic content. "The grammar of a language, like its lexicon, is not unreasonably viewed as a garden of faded metaphors." Linguistic theory must take into account figurative aspects of language. Though Langacker uses the obsolete framework of generative semantics, the article is still worth reading. Levitas, Maurice. 1974. Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. See chapter 7: 'Language and deprivation.' Levitas articulates the basic ideas of Vygotsky's view of language and thought and its educational implications. He accepts Vygotsky's view that word-meaning is the unit of verbal thought. Luria terms context-bound speech which fails to separate the sign from its referent, 'synpraxic speech,' which is a particular stage in a child's speech. Using Vygotsky and Luria, Levitas argues that working class children must be helped to master the elaborated code and to achieve in linguistic expression freedom from the context. Macnamara, John. 1970. "Bilingualism and thought," in Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1970: Bilingualism and Language Contact, edited by James E. Alatis; Washington: Georgetown University Press; p. 25 -45. Includes discussion by other participants. The inadequacies of Whorf's formulations are analyzed. Macanamara urgently emphasizes the need for a semantic theory. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1983. Grammatical Theory: Its Limits and Its Possibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newmeyer clarifies the nature and intent of generative linguistics, answers common objections, and dispels popular misconceptions. Newmeyer deals with both distinctive advantages of generative linguistics, its potential applications, and the role of other types of linguistics that deal with aspects of language outside of the reach of grammatical theory. ______. 1986a. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This is an excellent treatment of the history of linguistics and its internal and external politics. Newmeyer defends scientific linguistics against superficial moralistic and utilitarian notions of linguistics and exposes the reactionary nature of anti-scientific attitudes buttressed by phony humanistic pretenses. He also deals with the institutionalization and expansion of theoretical paradigms in linguistics and to what extent they are advanced or hindered by bureaucratic, economic, and political factors. Among other things, he demolishes Whorf's notions about grammar and world view and gives practical examples of Whorfianism's pernicious racist implications. ______. 1986b. Linguistic Theory in America. 2nd edition. Orlando: Academic Press, Inc. This differs from the first edition in that it abridges treatment of earlier developments such as rise of abstract syntax and generative semantics in the late 1960s and adds information on recent developments. This book gives a real feel for the problems and evolution of theories, and shows how the rise and fall of competing theories or versions of a theory come about as responses to real problems, not just fads. The linguistically illiterate can also see that Chomsky's particular theoretical formulations form only part (and not always the most influential current) of the stream of modern linguistic theory. Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. 1973. Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton. His other works on linguistics and economics are deplorable examples of intellectual charlatanism, but this book admirably analyzes the shortcomings of and ideology behind the doctrine of linguistic relativity, including the white liberal guilt about Indians characteristic of people like Whorf. Schaff, Adam. 1973. Language and Cognition. Translated by Olgierd Wojtasiewicz; edited by Robert S. Cohen; introduction by Noam Chomsky. New York: McGraw-Hill. [Originally published in Polish, 1964.] Chomsky's introduction is a valuable critique of Whorf and of superficial understanding of languages. He shows that the imputation to a language of a conceptual system about time based on its tense system does not hold up to examination. The English tense system with its use of verbal auxiliaries (including modals) suggests a different conception of time than idea of time characteristic of modern English-speaking and other European peoples. Schaff gives a history of ideas (mostly in philosophy) about language and thought from 18th century German idealism, through Neokantianism, conventionalism, logical positivism, to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and then adds his own thoughts on the matter. Brown's Scientific American article on Loglan is referenced in the bibliography but is not mentioned in the text. Vygotsky, Lev. 1986. Language and Thought. 2nd edition. Translation newly revised and edited by Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. In my view, Vygotsky was the greatest pioneer in the area of developmental psychology, language and thought. Philosophically, he was way ahead of Piaget, and he makes Whorf look simply infantile. Vygotsky lived in an intellectual climate (the USSR before Stalin ruined Soviet science and culture) that was a more ideologically benificent influence than the middle class mindset of Piaget's world or the contemptible racist mysticism that dominated American social science and lobotomized the minds even of white liberals like Whorf. --------------------- from JL14, Mar. 1991 [John Hodges takes a different perspective on people's reasons for learning Loglan/Lojban (his reasons apply regardless of the language name). His arguments are sound though pessimistic; I feel a little optimism is necessary for anyone to choose to learn an artificial language expecting practical benefit. Nora points out that John and I both have omitted the reason most people who have actually knuckled down and started learning the language - as a linguistic toy, a personal mind expander. This minor, totally impractical aspect may be the spark to get a 'movement' started once we have a larger speaker-base. from John Hodges, on 'Why Lojban' I've pondered the subject of "Why Lojban?" We need to provide answers on an individual level, "Why should I study Lojban now?" Lojban may have many uses, but not all of them can be used as reasons for an individual to learn it. E.g. John Cowan's suggestion that L. may be valuable in linguistic research as a case study in the process of creolization. (Though, since creolization is an example of language evolution, it would seem to me for that purpose one would want an evolved language, not a constructed one.) [Bob: If you have fluent speakers, one would expect the processes of language evolution to be the same.] If there were a sizeable L-speaking community, a researcher might become interested. But I doubt if any individual would learn Lojban in order to improve the opportunities for lin- guistic research into creolization. The original "basic three reasons" still hold, in varying amounts for different people. The hope that those who think in Lojban will think "better" in some measurable way, more flexibly and/or more logically, is the one that will provide my own motivation. Potential usefulness as a computer language may motivate Computer Science researchers. Potential as a Global Auxiliary Language, a "common tongue" to reduce language barriers, may interest some more. I have written before on the possible aid that the computer- science people could give to the global-common-tongue ideal. Machine translation FROM Lojban TO natural languages would seem much more practical than any other kind of machine translation. It seems to me the project most likely to give tangible results within a small number of years. It is a project that can be worked on by a small number of widely scattered people. It is a project that may be "academically respectable", suitable for theses and grants. It can be done by people who are not terribly fluent in anything but their native tongue. Intermediate results, software that gives bad but decipherable translations, can still be useful as research and as teaching tools. Altogether, in my opinion, enough to give a "reason for existence", or a practical focus, to la lojbangirz. if efforts toward a mass movement fizzle. Unfortunately, I am not a computer-science person, and I have concluded that I am not likely to become one. My motivation is too weak for the work that would involve, given my starting point. Hence I cannot contribute personally to a machine-translation effort. I am starting out (once more on a new direction, toward graduate study of philosophy, in logic and ethics. My interest in Lojban will be in its potential as a language for thinking clearly in. (Pardon my English.) The class I taught never got to the "logical connectors", and, or, xor, not, if, because, etc.... I recall you expressing a hope that a parser that could look ahead more than one token might allow a simplification of Lojban's system of logical connectors. Here also, then, the contributions of CS people are of high value. Lojban's value as a teaching vehicle for Logic, or (perhaps more likely) for linguistics, are potentially reasons for learning Lojban, for those who already wish to learn logic or linguistics. Someone would have to write a textbook on logic or linguistics that used Lojban as such a vehicle. Who knows, I might do that someday. I'll keep it in mind. I have thought of the appeal of exclusivity and secrecy; given that so few people know this language, hobbyists might use it for private speech or writing. Diaries and intimate conversation... but is that enough motivation for learning a language, even one relatively easy to learn? Codes and ciphers would serve those purposes with less effort. I have thought of calling L. "Dragontongue", recalling my Dad's comment that Lojban looked like nothing human. Fantasy fans might be attracted to it because of that. Again, I doubt this motivation is strong enough. I have written on the global-common-tongue idea; given start-up-costs, increasing returns to scale, and inertia of established standards, I think our only hope is through machine translation. AFTER a dramatically successful test of Sapir-Whorf, the S-W angle may give us another selling point. Until MT or SW materializes, I think Esperanto owns the field, and even they have a very uphill fight. I think the most-likely-future is for the largest natural languages to grow and consolidate. In areas with a lot of small, fiercely loved ethnic or national languages, AND no clearly dominant existing common tongue, Esperanto will have its appeal to the sensible minority. Barring a sudden global attack of sanity, there will be no global common tongue. But given MT from L. to the largest N natural languages, L. could sweep the field.