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At 03:46 AM 6/3/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> 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 What is the motivation for 'Zipf' if not practicality?
For Lojban design: because JCB said so.In real life, I think Zipf is overblown. In "high social registers" verbosity is considered a virtue; talking in monosyllables isn't going to win any respect.
I wonder whether "izpolzovat" is as frequent as "use".
It would seem so, and there are other words and phrases of significant length that are common as well. For example, that which we call WW II in Russian is called such things as the "Great Patriotic War" only taking twice as many syllables as the English - it seemed to be talked about just as much despite the long form.
The West shortened "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" to "Soviet Union". I've never seen a comparable shortening in Russian, and SSSR seemed to be spelled out a lot more than USSR was in the stuff I've seen.
Perhaps it is only as frequent as "utilize". "Artistic" does not strike me as so frequent a word that a bit of extra length is conspicuously cumbersome.
A bit? xudozhestvennaya 6 syllables with a feminine modificand.
As for the cumbersomeness of English 'tense', I'm not sure what you mean. Probably periphrastic constructions. But these tend to be either infrequent or very phonologically reduced.
I'm not sure vs. I not sure (the Russian equivalent). I was reading the book vs I read the book. or in the future I will be reading the book vs I will read the book vs I will have been reading the book.This shows up rather strongly in looking at the brevity of Lojban perfective tenses which rather nicely (if by accident since I knew no Russian at the time) matches the Russian system (but are regular), as compared to attempts to translate them into the comparable English.
Also, in saying that "the practicality of an expression partly involves how longwinded it is", I also have in mind that the speaker makes a calculation of an expression's cost in terms of effort to the speaker and hearer and benefit in terms of communicating information.
I don't think that speakers make such calculations. I think that language AS A SYSTEM, undergoes some optimization for efficiency in communicating information, wherein we can trade precision and artistry (and formalism) for brevity when speed is important. If Lojban is to value precision and formalism, it WILL have greater length.
For any bit of information (by which I mean to include small bits, such as whether a reference is singular or plural), there will be a degree of cumbersomeness beyond which the informativeness is not worth the effort.
But, if one studies for example 19th century conversational styles, one would find that the degree of cumbersomeness changes with the social context. It is the peculiarities of the modern American (and perhaps British) English social contexts that are placing great value on brevity. But I can't imagine that people who want to learn Lojban do so for its brevity.
I would have thought this point was blindingly obvious, were it not that so many Lojbanists seem oblivious to it. You can see this point illustrated today on Lojban-list, by Pierre and Craig discussing ways to avoid zo'u, with Craig suggesting that the effort of using zo'u is not worth the benefit of saying what one means (in casual speech).
Yep. That is indeed a tradeoff. Lojban allows sloppiness. It is the job of the teachers to make it clear that it is sloppy. After all, in English we don't see breeds of dog either, "we see 3 dogs, each representative of a breed which is distinct from the breeds of the others".
Longer-winded than the Lojban.
> >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. I hope Nick will give this one of his splendidly scornful tirades. If I may echo Jordan's rhetoric, this notion of "lack of fluency" is a load of shite. Sure we lack fluency. But there is nothing there to be fluent in. If they can be said in Lojban, the bits of Lojban they can be said in are the bits of Lojban that haven't been created yet.
Correct. And once we agree upon a pattern for expressing that sort of thing, fluent language habits would spread its usage to all manner of like situations. I contend that the reason we don't agree is because there is too little fluency, too little experience trying to communicate. If we had gained that experience, we would be able to agree, and likely there would be somewhat less contention about how to say it either formally or sloppily.
So when I say "nobody can find a way to say in Lojban", I mean "nobody can find a way to say in the bits of Lojban that have been created so far".
The solution to that is xod's and Jorge's: start creating more Lojban.
As for not having thought things through, if jboske debates don't count as thinking things through, then nothing does. I am not acquainted with any group of people better able to think things through than the jboskepre. I am not talking about just within the Lojban community; I'm talking about all aspects of my life.
I've never had a problem with that aspect of jboske.
> I contend for example that all of the nuance that people are trying for in > the gadri are NOT especially expressible in English Different grammarians have different views on the extent of polysemy in grammatical categories. Generally, the more formalist one is by persuasion, the more one favours monosemy, and on that view it is the case that not all the nuances are encoded in English. But we do conceptually distinguish the nuances when communicating in English. Since Lojban won't tolerate polysemy, then Lojban must either find different ways of encoding each nuance, or leave some nuances unencoded.
So long as the cmavo are a closed set, every word amongst them will cover a range of meaning and hence be to some degree polysemous.
But I don't think we really disagree, except that I think we can encode all nuances if we so choose.
(Personally I don't think it vital that every nuance be encoded. But I do think that the most important distinctions should be encoded, and that that is not what the current gadri system does.)
I don't think we know or agree on what are the most important distinctions. It is that disagreement that led in 1994 to the current formulation which I can defend only in saying that "it is baselined", but never approved of.
Meanwhile I note that TLI and JCB never seemed to be bothered with only having around half the gadri that we have and using them even more sloppily.
> 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 I can't really comment on this without a precise specification of the version of whorfianism that the experiment is supposed to test. I may be wrong, but my impression is that colour terms were chosen because they were an easy way to prove a general point, not because they were the only way.
Originally that may have been true. My understanding is that the 1980s Kay/Kempton experiments were NOT SWH experiments - they were looking at something else, and spotted something unexpected.
> 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 As you yourself recognize, this is fraught with difficulties, as is using Lojban as the language of experiment. I conclude that there must be easier ways to test SW -- as evidenced by the ways that psychologists actually do try to test it.
My understanding is that SWH became passe in part because what could be tested were largely uninteresting extremes and subsets of language.
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