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Lojbab:
> At 12:52 AM 12/6/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> >Right. It bugs me that because it is monosyllabic you go for {le}
> >It's not your choice that bugs me; it's that the choices made by
> >the language designers in allocating phonological shapes to cmavo
> >should have such an impact on what we choose to say in our Lojban
> >sentences
>
> Do you realize you are being strongly Sapir-Whorfian in the implications of
> that line? If the matter of one syllable in sound length leads us to
> choose what you consider a less effective mode of communication, with a
> slightly different meaning therefore being communicated, then the structure
> of the language is indeed determining how we think in a rather strong way
Isn't it fairly uncontroversial that what speakers actually say in
their sentences is quite heavily determined by what things the
language makes easy to say and what things the language makes hard?
If that makes me a whorfian then I certainly am; I have long thought
that a the effectiveness of a logical language is proportional to
its ease of use, and that the goal of a logical language is to
translate logical formulas into something easier (that doesn't alter
the meaning).
--And.