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Lojbab: > At 10:31 PM 12/17/02 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote: > >On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, And Rosta wrote: > > > I have used lo'e and le'e for Unique, but I consider my usage to > > > be exploratory, and in no wise canonical, and I don't care if it > > > gets invalidated. I consider all Lojban text written to date to > > > be intrinsically invalid, because it is written on the basis of > > > such an incomplete language and such an incomplete understanding > > > of it > > > > > >Two years ago I would have responded with hysterical flamery. Now, I > >agree. When the Leading Lights remain in such fumbling disarray week after > >week over such fundamental concepts, can Lojban be said to have produced > >any emergent consciousness yet? .iseni'ibo .a'o da na'eca zo'onai jeba > >.a'o veldrani le lojbo > > The thing I am wondering is, is ledu'u jboske a Sapir-Whorf effect? > > We seem to have a bunch of people, many with no formal linguistic training, > plumbing the bowels of loi bangu (choose your interpretation of loi > appropriately, or replace by lo'e or le'e or lei or ...), and going so far > that Nick has to read research papers to see if anyone in the theory > department has caught up with us > > We may give Nick his professional advancement yet, if he gains lots of > paper-worthy insights into language from all this ferment, though I doubt > that he thought of that when he volunteered for byfy duty (in which case > the concept of Lojban as a linguistic test bed will have been vindicated) It's quite unusual for linguists to ask "What meanings does a language need to be able to express?". Normally they ask "What meanings does (expression Y in) language X express?" or "How do languages in general handle the semantic field of such and such?". So Jboske is doing something unusual but not necessarily avantgarde. However, a CLL-calibre exposition of Jboske would make a splended semantics textbook: many many people are interested in the question "what meanings does a lg need to be able to express/encode?", and jboske & indeed Loglan in general has a genuine contribution to make to answering it. Some debate, such as which meaning belongs to which cmavo, is irrelevant to addressing that question, but on the other hand the fact that the insights into meaning get embodied in a concrete language is probably useful as a way of representing a map of meanings. --And.