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At 10:09 PM 6/2/03 +0100, And wrote:
Lojbab: > >I'm a bit lost about who we're talking about here. If we're talking > >about the "I don't understand the logic, so I'm going to use Lojban > >as if it were my native English" school, then I agree. But if we're > >talking about the "Certain natural languages can express conceptually > >fundamental notions that Lojban cannot express in any practical way" > > I should not in passing that such a claim requires a rather strong version > of the SWH that anti-SWHers should not be lightly invoking No, it doesn't. The practicality of an expression partly involves how longwinded it is,
I disagree, primarily because of by experience with Russian. By English standards, parts of Russian seems terribly long-winded and non-Zipfean: their word for "use" is "izpolzovat" (sp?), their word for "artistic" is 5 syllables, they express dates in years the LOOOONg way: one thousand, nine hundred, ninety seven. They still seem to use these quite a lot despite their length. On the other hand, they encode a lot of tense/aspect information in their perfective system, which English expresses only cumbersomely with extra words. Still English isn't tenseless and uses those words, longwinded though they may be.
so even though any language can express anything (I conjecture), they don't do it with equal facility.
I don't think that length is necessarily a measure of facility. The English tense system, for an English speaker is no more cumbersome than the briefer Russian tense system is for the Russian, and indeed English speakers find learning the shorter Russian system quite burdensome.
Furthermore, we regularly come up against stuff that is easy to say in English but that nobody can find a way to say in Lojban.
I think that this is partly lack of fluency. I think they can be said in Lojban, but we haven't thought things through always. We are also sticklers for "doing it right" in Lojban, whereas English speakers merely try for what works. Lojban could adopt sloppy "what works" solutions to a lot of these issues, but thereby would defeat its goals of logical expressiveness.
I contend for example that all of the nuance that people are trying for in the gadri are NOT especially expressible in English.
> >Ideally all lojbanists would do that. OTOH, learning lojban as a > >means of learning logic seems like quite a good thing > > And indeed one proposed SWH test involved comparing the "logical thinking" > of Lojbanists not formally taught or studying logic with controls of lay > people, lay people taught formal logic in English, and Lojbanists taught > formal logic (before, during, or after learning the language) [...] > This isn't a particularly easy test to conduct, but no one ever claimed > that Lojban would make it easy to do so, merely plausible I don't really see why Lojban commends itself as a language of experiment. Indeed, as you say in the snipped bit, the test would work better with native speakers, so a natural language would be a better choice than Lojban.
But no natural language is well-designed to produce a measureable distinction in any axis that really matters. That is one reason why researchers are stuck using color terms - they form measureable distinctions between languages; on the other hand it is not clear how color terms might be significant to thought.
Meanwhile, if we were to, say, try to determine if one natural language more than another enabled "logical thinking", we would quickly run afoul of the political correctness that Jordan seems to be invoking. How do we tell whether facility with logic (or whatever other trait is tested for) is due to the language, as opposed to whether the "race" (ethnicity) that speaks the language is genetically less able to handle logic. Unfortunately, native speakers of most languages are ethnically distinct from those who speak different languages.
We also have the problem of recognizing in a natural language that it does or does not "enable logical thinking". The features of natural language seem haphazard and not systematically designed to accomplish any particular purpose.
IOW, even if Lojban could be used for a SW experiment, I don't see why it should be preferred to any other language. Hence its suitability for SW experiments is not distinctive to the language.
We'll have to see. lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org