archives of the CONLANG mailing list ------------------------------------ >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Jun 1 02:42:38 1993 Date: Mon, 31 May 93 20:42:21 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306010042.AA21072@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: response to Barry - learning a conlang The reason that learning a conlang takes 'as long as a natural language' to ln has NOTHING to do with the difficulty of the language. Your key question was 'with the expressivity of a natural language'. You learned to express your self in your native language with your current expressivity NOT in a year or two, but if you are a university sdtudent or graduate, more likely over 15 to 25 years OR MORE. For people of a given edication level, your standard of 'exporessivity' will be that which you are used to in everyday living. Regardless of the language, that takes a long time. For example, I have two adopted Russian children, who are ages 5 and 7 and have lived with me for 8 months now. I have had the rough equivalent of a year of university Russian, although self-taught from the textbooks. When I was in Russia. I couldn't understand more than an occasional word spoken by th the fluent adults. I could only understand a bit more of what my kids could say. Now, after 8 months, my kids and I converse EASILY in RUssian, and I think their vocabulary has stayed fairly constant (not grown unfortunately - I suspect they learn some new words from me at the same rate they forget words I never have known or used). But I in no way converse fluently, and my grammar is somewhere between aweful and horrible. The Russians who helped me adopt the kids came last month for a visit. To make a long story short, I STILL CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THE ADULTS SAY, eoither in vocabulary or in speed/fluency (or grammar). The vocabulary and expressivity of 6 year old communication is simply not acceptable for adults. I suspect a lot of Esperantists can converse equally well as a 6 year old native speaker, with a vocabulary of maybe a few thousand words. But 'adult expressivity' requires a vocabulary of 20000 to 50000 words, some knowledge of the subtleties of semantics, etc. that simply can't be acquired without years of practice and usage. I think the techniques needed to achieve different levels of language skill are different. But you also have to set goals and standards that are achievable. Functional use of a conlang as a second language is a much lower standard than 'full expressivity of a natlang', and probably sufficient for most people's needs for that language. I think a conlang, being simpler than a natlang, can be gotten to FUNCTIONAL level MUCH QUICKER than a natlang can. The time from FUNCTIONAL to FULL command of a language is probably independent of how the language came to exist. lojbab >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Jun 1 03:15:42 1993 Date: Mon, 31 May 93 21:15:23 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306010115.AA21432@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Conlang learning time Re ways to avoid emergence of a complex norm: Lars suggested three ways, and most have some validity in the Lojban community 1) We've tried to specify usage rules for a much more complex set of expressive possibilities than probably has ever been dome for a conlang (this is what gives Lojban a 'bad name' as being 'SO COMPLEX'. Much of this stuff is unnecessary for everyday usage at a 'functional level' as opposed to a 'complex norm' (for example, the thread started a few days ago by Frank S. led to him trying to express a simple English phrase in Lojban. He has chosen to use a phrasing that involves "fi'o", a construct that we consider to be a complex bell-and-whistle, rather than a simple but less accurate phrasing. This is of course his choice, and perhaps indeed, he will find this complex usage to be easier to learn than the simpler but semantically ambiguous tanru (metaphorical) techniques. 2) Making the langauge flexible - well, we've already discussed to death the ability to make lujvo the 'easy way' with full expansion, or the 'hard way' with short affixes. As far as I know, there is no stigma attached to using long forms, and I do so myself much of the time as the 'example-setting' personage of the project (though not much in writing since I haven't written much in recent months). Giving people choices will of course be seen by some as making the language unnecessarily complex. But as Lars, said, if all forms are semantically identical, this 'complexity' is pure illusion. 3) We have only one usage flame that is really tolerated - being 'malglico' or damnably English in your phrasing of an idea. This flame is generally delivered with a large dose of humor, and often with a dose of education as to more satisfactory ways of expressing the same thing. If there is any other usage sin in the language, it is only that was writing so as not to be understood. "What the heck does this mean?" is a usage flame of a sort, but one that incidentally helps, rather than hinders the emergence of a complex norm that is not understandable to those less skilled in the language. lojbab >From mnu@inel.gov Tue Jun 1 17:44:08 1993 Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 09:44:25 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306011544.AA00188@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: Lojban list Subject: Metaphor in conlangs Cc: conlang@diku.dk Howdy conlangers and Lojbanists! Although this thread originated on Lojban List, I am sending a copy to conlang list, since I think people there may find it interesting. The basic problem under discussion is how to translate the expression "look through a window" and to somehow get across the concept of "through-ness"; i.e., the idea that the window is being used as a pathway or channel. I suggested that an instrumental sense using a word like "with" is the best way to translate it; i.e., "to look WITH a window". My reason is that this approach will always be understood, even if it sounds odd when translated into some natural languages. Robert J. Chassell writes: > > When I look through the window at the field, I am usually > observing. (Here I am using "through" in the sense that my line of > sight goes through the window, not that I am look "by means of the > window".) > There is a serious potential problem here, stemming from the fact that you are using the idea of "through" in a non-literal (i.e., metaphoric) sense. In other words, you are trying to translate an English metaphoric usage into Lojban. Your translation will make sense to English speakers, but will not make sense to all non-English speakers. It's instructive to consider how other languages represent the same concept. Since Colin Fine disliked my French example, perhaps examples from a different language will be more convincing. Consider Russian: Russian: Ya smotryu v okno. gloss: I look in window. English: I look through the window. The more typical Russian word for "through" would be "cherez", and it would be used in contexts involving physical movement along a path or tunnel. It is NOT used in the above case. What's even more interesting is that it is also not used in the case of throwing something (such as a rock) through a window. In this case, the same preposition "v" (meaning "into", since motion is implied) would be used. Obviously, Russians do not think of a window as something that one looks or moves THROUGH. Instead, one looks IN or moves INTO it. Perhaps the thickness of the window is the defining criterion in the way Russians think of a window. Now, there are other languages that share the English metaphor: Indonesian (melihat lewat = to see through or via) and Hungarian (atnez = to thru-see) are similar to English. I suspect that speakers of these languages will have no problem understanding the English metaphor. However, there are other languages, like Russian, that see things differently. The only one I know of offhand is Swahili, where the word used to say "look through" would be "angalia", which implies "looking out of or from". Professional translators are intensely aware that translation of metaphor is not only risky, but generally impossible. The more abstract the metaphor, the greater the difficulty. And when a translation fails, it either generates gibberish, or it means something completely unintended. As a result, I suspect that your attempt to translate "look through a window" will succeed only if the listener/reader speaks a language that shares the English metaphor, or unless you are so specific and detailed in your translation that he effectively LEARNS the metaphor. If you feel you can succeed, though, here are a few others you can try: Try to capture the "on-ness" in: He played a song ON the piano. Try to capture the "under-ness" in: He worked UNDER Johnson for 3 years. My own feeling about metaphor is that it's use should be strongly discouraged by conlang inventors by ensuring that the vocabulary is sufficiently rich to make metaphor unnecessary. (I wouldn't want to be a poet writing in a conlang. :-) The only way metaphor will work properly is if the metaphoric system of the conlang is PRECISELY defined. In effect, you must provide a "syntax and semantics" for the metaphor of your language. Since a comprehensive analysis of the metaphoric system of a NATURAL language has never been done (to my knowledge), I doubt if providing such a system for a conlang is technically feasible. Avoid the use of metaphor in your conlang. Most attempts to communicate using metaphor WILL fail. But since we tend to use metaphor naturally and without thinking, this is easier said than done. :-( Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From doug@netcom.com Tue Jun 1 19:41:31 1993 Message-Id: <9306011741.AA14971@netcom.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 10:41:52 PDT In-Reply-To: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) "Metaphor in conlangs" (Jun 1, 7:19pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs I have the strong opinion that "avoiding metaphor in conlangs", or indeed anywhere else, is completely pointless, indeed impossible. Usually people are thinking of *colorful* metaphors when they say such things. However, simple metaphors are a fundamental basis of all languages. The use of prepositions always boils down to metaphors. The question of whether one looks "through" or "to" or "with" or "in" a window is simply a matter of what kind of metaphor is conventional. There are no universals on the subject. Since I have reason to think that my opinion is in the minority, I'm not likely to argue the point, though. I'll either eventually be able to say "I told you so" when enough evidence comes up, or I won't. :-) Doug >From robdean@access.digex.net Tue Jun 1 20:12:23 1993 From: Rob Dean Message-Id: <199306011812.AA26729@access.digex.net> Subject: "He's Dead Jim" To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 14:12:17 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 515 I just subscribed to this list a few hours ago, after a discussion on Klingon was transported over to soc.culture.esperanto. Someone asked (as a joke, I presume), how one would say "He's Dead, Jim" in Volapu"k. So, since I have a teach yourself Volapu"k book at my desk here (don't ask), I looked in the small English->Volapu"k dictionary to find that they did not list a word for "dead". SO much for that idea. Does anyone have access to a more complete Volapu"k dictionary? Rob Dean robdean@access.digex.net >From dean@anubis.network.com Tue Jun 1 20:55:26 1993 Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 13:54:33 CDT From: dean@anubis.network.com (Dean C. Gahlon) Message-Id: <9306011854.AA22001@anubis.network.com> Received: by orion.network.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA02210; Tue, 1 Jun 93 13:54:30 CDT To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Rob Dean's message of Tue, 1 Jun 93 20:27:38 +0200 <199306011812.AA26729@access.digex.net> Subject: "He's Dead Jim" I attempted to post this earlier, but ran into a problem with my subscription to this list (now solved). My initial guess (although I'll have to check this, not having any of my Volapu:k references here) is that it would be something on the order of: "Binom mortik, Djim", or maybe "mortikom, Djim" (or maybe even "aimortikom, Djim" if you want to use one of those funky aorists). I'll try to check this tonight. (Although he said not to ask, I'm intensely curious about Rob Dean's "Teach Yourself Volapu"k" book. I myself have three books on Volapu"k: a dictionary by M. Wood, _Post's Volapu"k Grammar_, and Sprague's _Hand-Book of Volapu"k_ (the latter bought just last weekend)). Dean >From robdean@access.digex.net Tue Jun 1 21:43:01 1993 From: Rob Dean Message-Id: <199306011942.AA12624@access.digex.net> Subject: Re: "He's Dead Jim" To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 15:42:57 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9306011854.AA22001@anubis.network.com> from "Dean C. Gahlon" at Jun 1, 93 09:26:29 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1258 > (Although he said not to ask, I'm intensely curious about Rob Dean's > "Teach Yourself Volapu"k" book. I myself have three books on Volapu"k: > a dictionary by M. Wood, _Post's Volapu"k Grammar_, and Sprague's > _Hand-Book of Volapu"k_ (the latter bought just last weekend)). Ah. Well, I meant "Don't ask" more in terms of "Don't ask me why this would be at my desk at work" rather than "Don't ask what it is". A few weeks ago, I visited my brother, a grad student at Indiana University in Bloomington, and looked through their library to see what they had on planned languages. Since they had a short book on Volapu"k (in English), I xeroxed the whole thing. The book was published in 1888 in Milwaukee, and has the wonderfully Victorian title: Volapu"k: An Easy Method of Acquiring the Universal Language Constructed By Johann Martin Schleyer Prepared for the English Speaking Public on the Basis of Alfred Krichhoff's Hilfsbuch with the addition of a Key to the Exercises and a Volapu"k-English and English-Volapu"k vocabulary by Klas August Linderfelt, Librarian of the Milwaukee Public Library. As you can see, the title is a book in itself. (-: Does that answer the question that you didn't want to ask? Rob Dean robdean@access.digex.com >From jcj@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Wed Jun 2 08:54:33 1993 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 16:53:27 EST Message-Id: <9306020653.AA18450@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@diku.dk From: jcj@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Subject: Re: Conlang learning time I think trying to avoid the emergence of socially more or less valued linguistic behaviour is futile. Variants _will_ arise in the normal course of social interaction and at least some variants _will_ be evaluated in line with the prestige of the speakers with whom they are associated, either individually or groupwise. I cannot imagine even the most extreme levelling totalitarianism being able to prevent either of these two processes. Btw, if it is true that the Esperanto "speech community" does not practice much valuation of variability, it is only because Esperanto is not (yet) a real native or even second-language speech community, hence the scare quotes. But in any case, the issue is probably orthogonal to the question of ease of learning. It is worthwhile asking just what it is that characterizes nativelike fluency, ie what it is that even highly gifted second-language speakers either lack or take _many_ years to acquire in a naturalistic setting, and which (probably) no speaker of any conlang has ever achieved. lojbab is on the right track: [...] The vocabulary and expressivity of 6 year old communication is simply not acceptable for adults. However there is some research to suggest that even his proposed 20,000-50,000 vocabulary would be _nowhere near enough_! I refer to an article by Andrew Pawley & Frances Hodgetts Syder entitled `Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency', in J. Richards & R. Schmidt (eds.) _Language and Communication_ (sorry, no publisher or year reference: I only have a photocopy). Pawley & Syder discuss two linguistic `capacities' that are characteristic of adult native speakers. `Nativelike selection' refers to their routine capacity to choose forms of expression which are not only grammatically and semantically well formed, but also nativelike, and so recognised by the speech community out of a plethora of possible paraphrases which are judged to be foreign or unidiomatic. Anyone who has tried to converse in a second language without the benefit of years of naturalistic exposure to it will recognise the syndrome: practically everything you say, even if meaningful, relevant and well formed, is simply not how the natives would say it. (Btw, I make a living out of trying to get rid of this hard-to-pin-down foreignness in subtitles written, mostly, by second-language speakers of English.) The other `capacity', `nativelike fluency', refers of course to the speed of spontaneous connected discourse among natives. As Pawley & Syder put it: [...] there is a puzzle here in that human capacities for encoding novel speech in advance or while speaking appear to be severely limited, yet speakers commonly produce fluent multi-clause utterances which exceed these limits. (p. 191) Their hypothesis is that these capacities rest on the (formally redundant) storage en masse of whole chunks and fill-in-the-blanks templates of linguistic forms: [...] we will argue that fluent and idiomatic control of a language rests to a considerable extent on knowledge of a body of `sentence stems' which are `institutionalized' or `lexicalized'. A lexicalized sentence stem is a unit _of clause length or longer_ whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed; [...] The stock of lexicalized sentence stems known to the ordinary mature speaker of English amounts to _hundreds of thousands_. (pp. 191-2; my italics) The hypothesis holds that by far the largest part of the English speaker's lexicon consists of complex lexical items including several hundred thousand lexicalized sentence stems. (p. 215) This is of course controversial (though as a theory of linguistic _performance_ I don't see what a generative grammarian would find in it to argue with). But it is at the very least plausible, and if true, sheds a rather cold light on the efforts of conlang designers to promote ease of learning by tinkering with grammatical structures etc. These efforts may well make it easier to achieve a certain level of bare communicative competence (especially in writing), but there seems to be no way of getting around the job of _massive_ memorization if true fluency is to be attained. And note that this difficulty cannot be met by somehow refusing to `build in' these institutionalized forms of expression: on this theory, they are the essence of realtime processing at speed. I take it for granted that a conlang designer would not be able to/ would not want to actually sit down and legislate these several hundred thousand lexicalized sentence stems: they would have to grow out of real-world use of the language. Until they are achieved, one way or another, there can be no fluency; and once they are in place, I suspect there can be no fluent use of the language in anything significantly less than the time it takes to master a natural language. Jason. >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Jun 2 11:17:53 1993 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1993 10:17:09 +0100 Message-Id: <6949.199306020917@atlantis> From: Colin Fine To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs Thus Doug Merritt: I have the strong opinion that "avoiding metaphor in conlangs", or indeed anywhere else, is completely pointless, indeed impossible. Usually people are thinking of *colorful* metaphors when they say such things. However, simple metaphors are a fundamental basis of all languages. The use of prepositions always boils down to metaphors. I agree with this. Colin >From mnu@inel.gov Wed Jun 2 16:51:08 1993 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 08:51:29 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306021451.AA00196@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs Howdy again, conlangers! Metaphors, metaphors, metaphors. I love metaphors! They're such interesting food for thought and serious discussion. Among some conlangers, they may have even achieved the status of sacred cows. Well, you know what they say: sacred cows make the best hamburger! Doug Merritt writes: > > I have the strong opinion that "avoiding metaphor in conlangs", or > indeed anywhere else, is completely pointless, indeed impossible. > Usually people are thinking of *colorful* metaphors when they say > such things. However, simple metaphors are a fundamental basis of > all languages. The use of prepositions always boils down to > metaphors. > Colin Fine writes: > > I agree with this. > I don't. As native speakers of a language, we use metaphor without effort, mostly because the metaphors are in common use: "prices rise, soar, plummet, nosedive", "the work is uphill, downhill or at a standstill", many people "drown their sorrows" and end up "in tears", etc. The simple fact is that we always know when we use metaphor creatively. It's when we repeat commonly used metaphors that we are not aware that we are using them. In this respect you are right - it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to stop using metaphor in YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. When you study a new language, however, one of the first things you learn is that the new language uses words differently, and that you can't translate things so literally. You quickly develop a knack for knowing when you can translate literally and when you cannot. This process is natural and happens without conscious effort on the part of the student. The same will happen when you study a conlang, if the conlang is designed and taught properly. When you start learning a new language, you quickly learn to avoid use of metaphor, and primarily limit yourself to literal language. As you develop proficiency in the language, you learn which metaphors are allowed, and you learn about the system of rules that govern their use. This is difficult and takes a lot of time and practice. In learning a conlang, you do NOT make the transition from literal language to metaphor, since a conlang will not have a metaphoric system. Instead, you learn how to avoid metaphor even more. In other words, when you study a natural language, you MUST learn which metaphors are allowable. When you study a conlang, you must learn to not use metaphor at all, which is much easier. As for the pointlessness of trying to avoid metaphor, think again. If you use metaphor in your conlang, and if you have an international audience, then many of your listeners/readers will misunderstand you. Consider simple examples like "he's as big as a mountain", or "he's as tall as a tree", or "he barks like a dog". I doubt if anyone will have a problem with these metaphors, since the concepts are simple and involve easily visualized and well-understood physical entities. But what about a metaphor involving a "sapling"? Does the metaphor imply "wiry strength", "suppleness and adroitness" or "bendability and flexibility"? Different people will interpret it differently, depending on their world-view. Even "obvious" physical metaphors won't always translate. How about "the ships plowed through the waves"? Are you saying that the ships moved easily, quickly and smoothly? Or are you saying that the ships moved slowly, with great difficulty, and with lots of shaking and rocking, like a real plow? In summary, metaphor almost never translates! Sometimes it simply sounds like gibberish. At other times, the metaphor is completely misinterpreted. If you have any doubts about this, then spend a little time at a library and look up some books on the theory and practice of translation. You'll get an eyeful! (An eyeful of what? Will you be blinded by the light? Will bugs or dirt get in your eyes? Will your eyes get sore from the strain? Go and find out for yourself! :-) If you are designing a conlang for use as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL), then you'd better make sure that it's vocabulary is rich enough (and easy enough to learn!) to deal literally with all aspects of communication. If you allow people to import metaphoric usages from natural languages, you'll just end up with a lot of confusion. Metaphorically yours, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Wed Jun 2 19:00:43 1993 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 17:46:03 +0100 From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Rick Morneau's message of Wed, 2 Jun 93 17:25:56 +0200 <9306021451.AA00196@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Subject: Metaphor in conlangs RM= Rick Morneau DM= Doug Merritt CF= Colin Fine DM: I have the strong opinion that "avoiding metaphor in conlangs", or DM: indeed anywhere else, is completely pointless, indeed impossible. DM: Usually people are thinking of *colorful* metaphors when they say DM: such things. However, simple metaphors are a fundamental basis of DM: all languages. The use of prepositions always boils down to DM: metaphors. CF: I agree with this. RM: I don't. For brevity I'm omitting most of the rest of Rick's post but, as I understood it, it could be summarised as: a) Metaphors aren't (always) readily understandable b) Metaphors are avoidable through use of literal language. (though said with much more poetry). These points seem to be valid to me, at least applied to metaphorical phrases, but they don't address the original point which is that prepositions quite often have a metaphorical effect. To use the original examples of "I look through the window" (English) and "I look in the window" (Russian) the first (implicitly) likens "to look" to a verb of motion and the second implies that the window has a property of containment both of which are (very mildly) metaphorical in that they imply properties that don't literally exist. This, to me, seems to be the result of the majority of our prepositions being primarily related to motion and position and then being pressed into secondary service for non-motion/position things through analogy, metaphor or plain random choice. This also applies to the other (natural) languages I've studied (with similarities being seen in the Finnish case endings that are often equivalent to our prepositions for instance). So, given the problem that different natural languages have used different analogies, metaphors or random choices, how do we go about designing a set of prepositions for a conlang that doesn't perpetuate our own language's foibles? 1. Do something along the lines of Lojban, where position plays the part of the preposition, e.g. with the predicate of motion "klama", there is no need to have words for "from" or "to" because they are implicit in the parameters of the predicate. 2. Restrict prepositions to their literal meanings and invent new prepositions. Esperanto has sort of done this with its all-purpose preposition "jen" (or is it "je"? can't remember exactly). 3. Retain the overloading of prepositions, but impose rules which allow the correct preposition to be chosen in all cases. I'm not sure that this is possible, but it bears thinking about if you aim to produce a naturalistic conlang which nevertheless is not too arbitrary. 4. Don't worry too much and just invent some foibles of your own :-) Any other ideas? And now for something completely different... RM: If you are designing a conlang for use as an International Auxiliary RM: Language (IAL), then you'd better make sure that it's vocabulary is RM: rich enough (and easy enough to learn!) to deal literally with all RM: aspects of communication. If you allow people to import metaphoric RM: usages from natural languages, you'll just end up with a lot of RM: confusion. I'm not entirely convinced of this. One of the reasons we use metaphor is to keep our conversation varied and ensure that our listeners remain interested in us; to remove all metaphor from a language might invalidate it for any use other than the brief exchange of information between speakers with no other common language. For instance, if your aim was to produce an IAL that would act as Europe's second language, one of the uses to which this might be put could be as the language of debate in the European parliament. Speeches can be boring enough as it is without shearing the language of all the more interesting devices of rhetoric; besides, any language which deprived politicians of the opportunity of displaying their erudition and wit would, I suspect, be rapidly discarded or modified. Perhaps an alternative to removing all metaphor is to survey the world's existing stock and choose the most interesting of them all to supply the language with its own ready-made collection... Matthew >From doug@netcom.com Wed Jun 2 19:47:55 1993 Message-Id: <9306021748.AA20483@netcom.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1993 10:48:20 PDT In-Reply-To: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel) "Metaphor in conlangs" (Jun 2, 7:19pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs Matthew's analysis of this subject is indeed precisely what I had in mind, and I again emphasize the importance of differentiating between what I called "colorful" metaphors, such as "right on target" (an example from George Lakoff's "WOmen, Fire and Dangerous Things"), versus nearly invisible metaphors such as "look through the window". Also be careful to distinguish metaphors from analogy. If you use the word "like" or "as", e.g. "big as an elephant" or "the dawn was like a fire", then you are using analogies, and analogies translate much better than metaphors. There's a sharp distinction, because analogies make it explicitly clear that a comparison is being made. Metaphors do not. Back to metaphors themselves: I used to think metaphors were simply an important component of speech. Due to work in semantic representation of utterances for AI/Natural Language Processing purposes, I slowly came to the conclusion that (non-colorful) metaphors are not just important, they are completely fundamental to speech. I won't argue this particular point because it won't be provable in this extreme sense until NLP is nailed down better than the current state of the art. Until then it's merely my opinion. If the software I write based on this notion can pass the Turing test, I'll consider the point proven. ;-) Doug >From urban@cobra.jpl.nasa.gov Wed Jun 2 20:34:47 1993 Message-Id: <9306021834.AA11863@odin.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs Date: Wed, 02 Jun 1993 11:34:42 PDT From: Michael P Urban Matthew Faupel writes: > And now for something completely different... > > RM: If you are designing a conlang for use as an International Auxiliary > RM: Language (IAL), then you'd better make sure that it's vocabulary is > RM: rich enough (and easy enough to learn!) to deal literally with all > RM: aspects of communication. If you allow people to import metaphoric > RM: usages from natural languages, you'll just end up with a lot of > RM: confusion. > > I'm not entirely convinced of this. One of the reasons we use metaphor is > to keep our conversation varied and ensure that our listeners remain > interested in us; to remove all metaphor from a language might invalidate it > for any use other than the brief exchange of information between speakers > with no other common language. Agreed. I think that Rick Morneau is making two very different assertions here. The first is that the IAL must _allow_ people to use nonmetaphorical methods to express things; the second is that you should _not_ allow metaphoric expressions to be imported from national languages. The first is something that we all agree with (to some degree, at least); the second seems like `linguistic facism' and will prove unenforceble in any case. If a Frenchman wants to insult me by saying that I am a camel -- in whatever language -- nothing in that language is going to stop him. In the Esperanto world, I think that many people find that a certain amount of `imported culture' in a particular speaker's choice of words and metaphors is part of the cross-cultural hands-across-borders experience that the Esperanto world is supposed to provide. The decision as to whether to use such expressions should be approximately the same as the decisions one makes in informal conversation versus formal writing. >From cc697@hela.INS.CWRU.Edu Thu Jun 3 10:36:06 1993 Message-Id: <9306030835.AA14339@hela.INS.CWRU.Edu> Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 04:35:56 -0400 From: cc697@cleveland.freenet.edu (Eric Oppen) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: "He's Dead Jim" Reply-To: cc697@cleveland.freenet.edu (Eric Oppen) >I just subscribed to this list a few hours ago, after a discussion on Klingon >was transported over to soc.culture.esperanto. Someone asked (as a joke, I >presume), how one would say "He's Dead, Jim" in Volapu"k. So, since I have >a teach yourself Volapu"k book at my desk here (don't ask), I looked in the >small English->Volapu"k dictionary to find that they did not list a word >for "dead". SO much for that idea. > >Does anyone have access to a more complete Volapu"k dictionary? > >Rob Dean >robdean@access.digex.net > There was an extensive English-volapu"k dictionary in the back of the standard English grammar, published by someone named (I _think_, I'm a long ways from my sources) Seret in 1887. What bibliographical info is there on your little book? -- _\| /\ |/_ : Old hobo sign, meaning "Man in this house has a gun." \/ \/ : I am of the opinion that it would make a good symbol /_______\ : for us who want to keep our Second Amendment rights. "Technomad" to my friends on ISCA and Quartz. >From robdean@access.digex.net Thu Jun 3 15:59:35 1993 From: Rob Dean Message-Id: <199306031359.AA13337@access.digex.net> Subject: Re: "He's Dead Jim" To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1993 09:59:17 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <9306030835.AA14339@hela.INS.CWRU.Edu> from "Eric Oppen" at Jun 3, 93 11:24:57 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1215 > There was an extensive English-volapu"k dictionary in the back of the > standard English grammar, published by someone named (I _think_, I'm a long > ways from my sources) Seret in 1887. > > What bibliographical info is there on your little book? The book that I have (a copy of) is entitled: Volapu"k, An Easy method of acquiring the Universal Language constructed by Johann Martin Schleyer prepared for the English speaking public on the basis of Alfred Kirchhoff's Hilfsbuch with the addition of a key to the exercises and a Volapu"k-English and English-Volapu"k Vocabulary by Klaus August Linderfelt, Librarian of the Milwaukee Public Library. (Milwaukee, C.N Caspar and M.H. Zahn, 1888) As you can see, it's got one of those Victorian run-on titles that covers the entire title page top to bottom. There are four pages of "bibliography" (more like an ad, really) at the back, and Seret's _Grammer with Vocabularies of Volapu"k for all Speakers of the English Language_ is listed...with the following note: "Is not according to the decisions of the last Volapu"k congress, and is written in very queer and faulty English." Keep that in mind if you have a copy (-:. Rob Dean robdean@access.digex.net >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Thu Jun 3 16:15:13 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 10:15:01 -0400 Message-Id: <9306031415.AA27882@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Eric Oppen's message of Thu, 3 Jun 93 11:20:12 +0200 <9306030835.AA14339@hela.INS.CWRU.Edu> Subject: "He's Dead Jim" >>I just subscribed to this list a few hours ago, after a discussion on Klingon >>was transported over to soc.culture.esperanto. Someone asked (as a joke, I >>presume), how one would say "He's Dead, Jim" in Volapu"k. So, since I have >>a teach yourself Volapu"k book at my desk here (don't ask), I looked in the >>small English->Volapu"k dictionary to find that they did not list a word >>for "dead". SO much for that idea. >> >>Does anyone have access to a more complete Volapu"k dictionary? >> >>Rob Dean >>robdean@access.digex.net Well, I'm not too sure I remember how to make participles in Vpk, but my dictionary gives 'deil"on' for "to die". This gives us: '"Adeilom, o Jim!' for "He died, Jim" (note umlaut on initial A), and 'Edeilom, o Jim!" for "He has died, Jim". I wonder if one should respell "Jim", translierating it into Vpk letters: "Cim". Probably not, I don't think that was commonly done. An aorist would be the wrong way to go, since it implies frequentive action, I think. (I mean the Vpk "aorists", I'm not commenting on aorists in general, about which I don't know much). ~mark >From mdceng!kuncej@uunet.UU.NET Thu Jun 3 19:31:25 1993 From: mdceng!kuncej@uunet.UU.NET Message-Id: <9306031647.AA09077@mdceng.mocons.gov> Subject: Re: From the Conlang mailing list To: esperanto@rand.org Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1993 11:47:39 -0600 (CDT) Cc: conlang@diku.dk X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL13] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1657 Michael P Urban writes: > ... > Barry Crown replied: > ...as Ken Miner wrote > recently, it takes almost as much work to learn Esperanto well as it does to > learn a natural language. In a recent article in the "Esperanto" magazine, > Donald Broadribb, a member of the Esperanto Academy, spoke about the need to > study the language for *several years* at a level equivalent to that of > university study in order to speak it well. > ...What is needed is to reduce Broadribb's > several *years* of study to several *months*. Can one create a conlang, which > can be learnt in such a short space of time, but which still gives one a > range of expression equivalent to that available in Esperanto? Maybe this quote was posted here (s.c.e.) a few months ago in the discussions about Malay and Indonesian. Even so, it's worth repeating: "Malay is an easy language. Bafflingly easy. At the end of ten weeks you feel that you know all that there is to be known. At the end of ten years, you know that you never will." -M. B. Lewis, in "Teach Yourself Malay" A wise statementr, in my opinion. A good dose of reality. Definitely sums up my experience with Esperanto. It's been proven that conlangs, pidgins, and other "inter-linguas" can be easy-to-learn for *basic* communications. But a conlang that allows the depth of expression of a "natural" language *and* can be learned in a few months? Sounds like the holy grail to me... --Jeff -- Jeffrey J. Kunce Missouri Conservation Dept kuncej@mdceng.mocons.gov voice +1 314 751 4115 Compuserve 76030,550 !uunet!mdceng!kuncej fax +1 314 751 8757 >From jennings@halcyon.halcyon.com Thu Jun 3 21:20:32 1993 Message-Id: <199306031916.AA12931@halcyon.com> Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1993 12:21:54 -0800 To: conlang@diku.dk From: jennings@halcyon.halcyon.com (James Jennings) Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs Doug Merrit (doug@netcom.com) wrote: >I have the strong opinion that "avoiding metaphor in conlangs", or >indeed anywhere else, is completely pointless, indeed impossible. >... simple metaphors are a fundamental basis of all languages... >Since I have reason to think that my opinion is in the minority,... I, for one, agree completely. There is some interesting literature that supports this view. "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Chicago Univ Press, 1980 "The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason" by Mark Johnson, Chicago Univ. Press 1987 "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind", by George Lakoff, Chicago Univ. Press, 1987 This last book I found particularly fascinating, although it doesn't focus on metaphor per se. James James Jennings *** jennings@halcyon.com *** 70740.1237@compuserve.com >From mnu@inel.gov Thu Jun 3 22:21:09 1993 Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 14:21:26 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306032021.AA00438@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Metaphor in conlangs Howdy conlangers! Several weeks ago, I posted a recommendation for a book that I felt would be useful to conlangers. The current discussion on metaphor makes it even more appropriate. Here it is again: Meaning-Based Translation: a guide to cross-language equivalence by Mildred L. Larson, University Press of America, 1984 ISBN 0-8191-4300-6 There are many other books on this subject, but this is the most comprehensive and easiest-to-read that I know of. The book has a chapter on metaphor, and discusses the difficulties involved in translating them from one language to another. By the way, Larson speaks of "simile" (what Doug Merritt calls "analogy") as a form of metaphor. Among linguists, the word "simile" is subsumed under "metaphor". In other words, a simile is a kind of metaphor. Larson gives several examples of how metaphor (including simile) are misunderstood depending on the natural language of the listener. For example, if you literally translate "John is a rock" into another language, you could be saying that he doesn't move, that he can't talk, that he's always there, or that he's very strong. If you say "John is like a sheep", you could mean that he has long hair, that he is a drunkard, that he doesn't answer back, that he follows without thinking, or that he's a young fellow waiting for girls to follow him(!). The interpretation will depend on the language spoken by the listener, and the interpretations given above are the ones that Larson is familiar with for those two metaphors. If you were to search through all of the world's languages, you'd find many more interpretations for metaphors using "rock" and "sheep". When you create metaphors that are not as obvious (calling John a "sheep" or a "rock" is a pretty obvious metaphor, even though the meaning may be misunderstood), the problem gets even worse, and literal translations are even more likely to be misunderstood or not understood at all. A sentence on page 250 sums up the whole problem: "Not all metaphors and similes are easily understood. If they are translated literally, word-for-word, into a second language, they will often be completely misunderstood." Keep in mind that this is when one translates from one natural language into ONE other language. When you are speaking/writing in a conlang intended for use as an IAL, your audience is likely to consist of people who speak many languages. In effect, you will be translating into all of those languages, and it is extremely unlikely that your metaphor will be understood by all listeners/readers. So, when I say that metaphor should be avoided in IALs, even so-called "transparent" metaphors using prepositions, I'm not kidding. Also, you cannot depend on your intuitions to tell you that a particular metaphor is "natural" or "universal". What may seem universal to a Frenchman may be gibberish to a Korean. If you don't believe me, or if you feel that I'm exaggerating the problem, go to a library and dig up some books on translation theory. You will quickly learn that you cannot have an INTERNATIONAL language AND use it to literally translate metaphors from a NATURAL language. Sorry, but that's life, and I don't like it either. :-( Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From mnu@inel.gov Fri Jun 4 15:55:46 1993 Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 07:56:05 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306041356.AA00167@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Lingweenies Howdy conlangers! I was digging through some stuff I wrote a long time ago in a different forum, and found the following. I thought some of you might find it interesting... What Are We, Anyway? Language professionals are called "linguists". Language amateurs are called... well... amateur linguists, I suppose. But, for some reason or other, I don't like calling myself an amateur linguist. Somehow or other it doesn't ring true. So, just for fun, I decided to try to come up with a more appropriate name. Here are a few that popped into my head: Lingualoonies (this one fits me to a tee) Lingarookies Rookalings Lingwackoes (this one also fits me to a tee) Lingooks Ticktalks Lungarees (linguists in dungarees?) Talkticks Linguafreaks Lingwookies (for fans of Star Wars) Talklings Lingookies Linguanos Langos (for those who like tropical fruit?) Tonguetwits Langtwits Lingtwits Twitlings Langaroos (Australian amateur linguists?) Langlings Linglangs Lingweenies Note that we could prefix "con-" to most of the above. :-) Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Sun Jun 6 15:45:57 1993 Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1993 22:55:54 +1000 From: Robin F Gaskell Message-Id: <199306061255.AA25087@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Modern Chinese Grammar Cc: tosho@cix.compulink.co.uk From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 31 May 93 To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlang Mail List) Subject: Modern Chinese Grammar Howdy Conlangers, Sorry I have not cleared my mailbox for a while: either I am doing a lot, or I am just not keeping up with things. In persuit of the IAL, and in wondering what sort of Second Language might suit the quarter of humanity that lives in China, I casually bought _Essential Grammar for Modern Chinese_ by Helen T. Lin (ISBN: 0-917056-10-8). On pages 3 & 4, in the Introduction, I found two remarkable statements. While Lin was talking about Chinese, the following description also fits one of the Planned Languages:- "Similarly, Chinese is no more or less capable of describing a given thought or action. Its grammar is no more or less complicated than, say, English or German. What sets the grammar of these languages apart is not the lack of tense form in Chinese verbs or plural form in Chinese nouns, etc., but rather that the other two languages express time and number through the use of inflectional endings, while Chinese uses measure words, time words, etc., and strict word order." "As remarked earlier, a language without inflectional endings must depend on the use of strict word order to indicate not only the relationship between the different parts of speech in a given sentence, but also the particular part of speech assumed by each word in that sentence. In studying Chinese, therefore, the process of vocabulary building--the process of learning the meaning of words--can never be wholly divorced from the grammatical features associated with these words. In other words, students should be reminded that the part of speech assumed by a word is contingent upon its position in a sentence." Your task is to identify the Planned Language. My task is to establish just how suitable it is for native speakers of Chinese to use. Cheers, Robin >From lojbab@grebyn.com Mon Jun 7 04:04:10 1993 Date: Sun, 6 Jun 93 22:03:48 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306070203.AA11816@grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: responses to Frank Schulz and Jeff Prothero (delayed) Frank Schulz wrote: >and gismu to be algorithmic. One way to do this is to restrict gismu to >CCVCV form, insist on uniqueness in the first 3 letters, and strip off >the last 2 letters to form the rafsi. That is: > jbama -> jba > klama -> kla > >This does require generating lots of CCV forms. I would rather learn to >generate and recognize new phoneme patterns, than to deal with the >complex lojban morphology. Easy C form additions are velar nasals and >voiced velar fricitives. Rereading my mail, I noted that I didn't complete answer this, observing only that Lojban's current phonology would allow only 240 CCV forms, because it has only 48 permissible initials. You seem to be suggesting that we rememdy this by some additions to the set of consonants. But, even if we could agree on this AND we allow all consonants to be clustered with 'l' and 'r' (the only ones I think you can be SURE of without looking closely at phonological effects), you get only 10 addtional cluster for 1 additional consonant. If you go so far as to make 'n' and 'm' liquids that are allowed to pair with all consonants, you can nearly double the number of clusters. So add 6 new consonants to get 300, then add 'n' and 'm clusters to get 1200, and you are still short of matching all the current Lojban gismu, even if you eliminated the culture words, as some would want, and packed the words tightly in the available space without any attempt at recognition aids (which I realize haven't been too helpful to you, though they have helped others). Of course, finding 6 consonants that you could add might be tough. I could live with a voiced velar fricative, now that I know how to say one, but we have plenty of people who already think they are going to choke saying Lojban 'x' initially, which is defined as the unvoiced frictaive but allows non-phonemic voicing if it helps, since it doesn't have the voiced counterpart. You would have an easier time adding vowels, which is what English has done, but there are many people who think Lojban already is pushing the limits of acceptability for number of vowels. (Jack Waugh, one of the original supporters when we first split Lojban from JCB, constantly tried to argue us into having one vowel fewer than whatever number we currently had in mind %^) Actually, if you've read the discussions on conlang for a while, you will find that people like Harrison and Morneau that try to come up with ideal prescriptions for conlangs say that conlangs should avoid consonant clusters completely. I defend the current system by noting that we considered a lot of tradeoffs (one of which included continuing historical Lojban traditions where possible). The set of consonants, vowels, and clusters was the very first issue we looked at, and we looked at it long and hard. We had linguists helping out, and the arguments ranged from minimizing (as Waugh wanted us to, after the manner of Polynesian languages) to increasing (as you suggest, but also supported by Gary Burgess, our Russian linguist, who jokingly suggested that we adopt the permissible initials of Georgian, since they are obviously speakable (at least by the Georgians). Jeff Prothero answered Frank: >| One way to do this is to restrict gismu to CCVCV >| form, insist on uniqueness in the first 3 letters, and strip >| off the last 2 letters to form the rafsi... > >I suggested this to Jim Brown during GMR, and his objection at the time >was lack of sufficient CCV forms. I failed to respond that by promoting >some 'effective' vowel such as 'r' to C status, and shifting to CC*V >(any number of Cs followed by a V) as the affix form, one could have an >indefinitely last (large) space of trivially resolvable morphemes... >I'm not sure if he would have been swayed, he tends to stick with his >own ideas, and he's very fond of classifying Loglan words using his >lenghth-mod-3 schemes, but the idea remains workable. This idea was proposed to JCB by others in several variations, the most recent public version of which was by Rex May a couple of years ago when Rex was editing LogNet. JCB gave a long, fairly rationale answer, published in LogNet that showed difficulties in meshing the idea with other principles of the Loglan design. Length mod 3 was not one of those principles, although keeping cmavo (little words) distinct from predicates was important (though it doesn't affect what Jeff talks about in this message directly). JCB's conclusion was more or less that the idea might work, and Rex was welcome do develop it into a conlang if he chose, but that such a morphology would not be 'Loglan'. As for mod 3 classifications, I have to note that I am to blame for that aspect of JCB's focus during GMR (the restructuring of Lojban from 1979-82). Loglan originally had only predicate words of 2 mod 3 length because that was necessary to JCB's originally very simple schemes for keeping cmavo separate from predicate words. When it was first contemplated that compounds should be resolvable AND distinguishable from both gismu roots (prims) and from cmavo (LWs), he obviously had to look at the other 'mod 3' word spaces to see how they could be contrasted. Right about then I first got involved in Loglan, and in a long evening discussion where he was trying to explain what he was trying to do in GMR (which I didn't understand at the time), and I was trying to find out how to get a word like "trumpet" into Loglan (I was trying to translate the "trumpets of glory" from _Man of La Mancha_), we came up with the scheme of 2 mod 3 for prims, 0 mod 3 for compounds and 1 mod 3 for borrowings. Whose idea it was, I can't remember, but JCB got into an real "aha!" mode late in the evening about this. He then went on to develop his ideas into an essay that 'responded to me', which was published in TL 3/4. While the scheme did not survive to be the final form of Loglan GMR, it certainly dominated JCB's thinking for a long while. (JCB now denies my participating in any of the thinking about GMR, or stimulating the TL 3/4 essay that set the framework for the GMR solution. This is either politics or his poor memory, since what happened made such an impression on ME - the fact that I, with no linguistic knowledge or real understanding of Loglan, could still have such a meaningful contribution, was what led me to become emotionally committed to the project.) lojbab >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Mon Jun 7 23:23:27 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Re: Modern Chinese Grammar To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1993 15:13:57 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <199306061255.AA25087@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU> from "Robin F Gaskell" at Jun 6, 93 04:37:32 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2503 Robin F Gaskell writes: > In persuit of the IAL, and in wondering what sort of Second Language > might suit the quarter of humanity that lives in China, I casually > bought _Essential Grammar for Modern Chinese_ by Helen T. Lin (ISBN: > 0-917056-10-8). > > On pages 3 & 4, in the Introduction, I found two remarkable > statements. While Lin was talking about Chinese, the following > description also fits one of the Planned Languages:- > > "Similarly, Chinese is no more or less capable of describing > a given thought or action. Its grammar is no more or less > complicated than, say, English or German. What sets the > grammar of these languages apart is not the lack of tense > form in Chinese verbs or plural form in Chinese nouns, etc., > but rather that the other two languages express time and > number through the use of inflectional endings, while Chinese > uses measure words, time words, etc., and strict word order." > > "As remarked earlier, a language without inflectional > endings must depend on the use of strict word order to > indicate not only the relationship between the different > parts of speech in a given sentence, but also the particular > part of speech assumed by each word in that sentence. In > studying Chinese, therefore, the process of vocabulary > building--the process of learning the meaning of words--can > never be wholly divorced from the grammatical features > associated with these words. In other words, students should > be reminded that the part of speech assumed by a word is > contingent upon its position in a sentence." > > Your task is to identify the Planned Language. My task is to > establish just how suitable it is for native speakers of Chinese to > use. This is obviously a description of Lojban/Loglan. Of course, neither Lojban/Loglan nor Chinese nor any other language truly allows any word to be used with any function -- all languages have a limited set of articles (possibly the empty set, like Russian); no language has a method of using its word for "blue" as an article. Chinese is not actually a particularly good example, though better than English, Russian, or Esperanto. Chinese does have a good clear distinction between nouns and verbs -- only verbs can be X in >bu X< 'not X'. Verbs incorporate what English calls adjectives, though. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Fri Jun 11 16:52:15 1993 Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1993 16:50 +0200 From: J%org Knappen Subject: Time travelling language To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GZ9C93DK0W8WW8FR@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE> X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Vms-To: GATEWAY"conlang@diku.dk" [Forwarded and shortned from the esperanto list] Date: 6 Jun 93 14:20:37 GMT From: not-for-mail@cs.utexas.edu (Gene P. Ledbetter) Subject: RE: Romanoj en Esperanto Sender: esperanto-request@rand.org To: esperanto@rand.org [...] Mi recente achetis 'plenan novelaron' (456 paghojn) de la sama SZATHMARI: "Perfekta civitano" (1988). Mi ne konis la verkiston kaj mi elektis la libron nur, char verkisto, kiu kreis tian titolon devas esti interesa. Jes ja!!! "Perfekta civitano" estas la titolo de nur unu el la 26 romanetoj. En la unua el ili, "Mashinmondo", H. G. Wells vizitas tempmashine estontan verkiston: HGW -- Mi legis vian verkon, skribitan en 1963, en kiu vi tute korekte priskribas la evoluon de la pensmashinoj en la malproksima estonto, kaj ties efikon al la socio. Chion tute korekte. EV -- Pardonon, sed mi ne skribis tiaspecajhon! HGW -- Mi ripetas, ke vi skribis ghin en 1963 kaj ni estas ankorau nur en 1962. Do, vi ankorau ne povis legi vian verkotajhon. EV -- Ho, jes, jes! Do, vi legis ghin en la estonto. Jes, mi legontis. Kaj samtial mi diris, ke ni jam [ ^^^^^^^^ Marked by me JK ] renkontighis. EV -- Do, en la estonto vi legontis mian verkon kaj ankau persone vidontis min? HGW -- Nu vi jam komencas kompreni. Do, mi ripetas, ke vi korekte priskribis la estonton. Chio realighontis lau viaj indikoj. EV -- Chu vere? Kaj kiel mi ekkonis la malproksiman estonton tiel precize en la proksima estonto? HGW -- Char mi mem portis al vi la indikojn. EV -- Al mi? Kiam? HGW -- Hodiau. ... [...] Gene LEDBETTER [ Forwarded by J"org Knappen] >From thorinn@tyr.diku.dk Sat Jun 12 20:56:44 1993 Date: Sat, 12 Jun 93 20:56:44 +0200 From: thorinn@diku.dk Message-Id: <9306121856.AA22415@tyr.diku.dk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: For your stupefaction Excerpt from article in rec.answers. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) >From: muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au (Murray Chapman) >Subject: LIST: MOVIE TRIVIA: in-jokes, cameos, signatures >Summary: Movie trivia, in-jokes, director's signatures, crazy credits >Keywords: movies trivia jokes cameos >Message-ID: >Date: 12 Jun 93 04:00:37 GMT ... # Return of the Jedi ... - Experiments with a computer to generate a random but logical language for some creatures produced a dialect of Greek. >From mnu@inel.gov Tue Jun 15 20:47:09 1993 Date: Tue, 15 Jun 93 12:46:37 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306151846.AA00375@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? Howdy conlangers! Since this list appears to be dead or dying, and since no one laughed at my lingweeny post, I'm gonna punish you all again by talking some more about metaphor. Ha, ha, ha, revenge is light. :-) (??? No, I meant "revenge is solid". No, that's wrong too. What I meant to say was that "revenge is mellow". No, that's wrong too! Wait, how about "revenge is like tumbling water"? Damn! That's wrong too! Does anyone know what I mean? What language am I speaking, anyway? :-( Believe it or not, someone actually read my recent ravings about the inadvisability of using metaphor in an International Auxiliary Language (IAL), and asked me how translators deal with the problem. Well, as it turns out, you CAN translate metaphor, but you have to be careful that you do it right. And if you do it right, you can also use metaphor in an IAL, although it may not be easy, and the result may not be as concise as you'd like. There are basically five ways to translate a metaphor. I will illustrate them below with the following sample sentence: "The ship plowed through the waves." 1. Translate the metaphor exactly, word-for-word. This will work only if the metaphor makes sense in the target language. For an IAL, this situation will almost never occur. 2. Re-phrase the metaphor as a simile. This helps some of the time, but only in languages where metaphor is rarely or never used. (I remember reading once about a pidgin language spoken somewhere in the South Pacific, in which the speakers never use metaphor (No - I don't have references, so don't ask). Even worse, these islanders refuse to believe anything even slightly metaphoric. If this is true, then my guess is that the mother languages of the people among whom the pidgin developed were so different that metaphor from one language almost always sounded like gibberish to speakers of the other mother languages. As a result, they quickly learned never to use metaphor at all. And although this may be an isolated (exaggerated? hokey? untrue?) case, translators are well aware that some languages use metaphor more heavily than others. How much they can differ is unknown, and I doubt if anyone has ever done a cross-linguistic study.) So, translating the sample metaphor in the form of a simile would give us something like: The ship moved through the waves like a plow. You don't gain much here, except for those target languages in which metaphor is more explicitly marked. The basic metaphor, however, must still exist in the target language. Again, this is not a solution for IALs. 3. Translate the metaphor into an equivalent metaphor in the target language. For example, in target language X, you may be better understood if you rephrase the example as "The ship ravaged through the waves" or "The ship wallowed through the waves like an ox". Again though, this will not work for an IAL, unless all of your listeners are native speakers of language X. 4. Translate the metaphor using literal language. This, of course, gets the point across, but destroys the imagery of the metaphor. In this case, our example might look something like "The ship moved through the waves slowly, powerfully and with difficulty". (That's sort of what this metaphor means to me - your mileage may vary.) This approach should always work, even for IALs. 5. Use the metaphor, but provide all necessary referents so that any listener will understand it. In effect, you must explain the metaphor to those who might not understand it. In this case, our example could sound something like "The ship moved through the waves, slowly and powerfully, like a plow being pulled through the hard earth". This approach will also work with IALs, but is more difficult and more verbose. (You also take the risk of sounding like a pompous fool, especially if all you want to say is "Please pass the salt". :-) Anyway, perhaps there's hope for you metaphorophiliacs after all. You'll just have to work a little harder at it. Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From lojbab@grebyn.com Wed Jun 16 06:24:30 1993 Date: Wed, 16 Jun 93 00:24:20 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306160424.AA25739@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? I would tend to think that most reasonably good Lojbanists, and any Lojban machine translation effort, would be using method 4 of Rick M.'s methods in translating a metaphor-word like 'plowed' into Lojban. Or better yet, a combination of 4 and 5: "moved, in the manner of a plow through dirt" is probably going to work by several of the methods, including simile - exactly what manner is vague, but I personally cannot think of too many interpretations of how to relate a plow moving through earth and a ship moving through water that wouldn't fit he use of the word "plowed". But Rick's version 4 also works for me, though I also get an image of 'slicing' or 'cutting' through waves which part to the sides as the ship moves through, in addition to the other literal aspects that Rick identified. The thing is, that Lojban as an interlingua, can STORE all that ponderous over-specified literalness unambiguously. Then, when going to the target language, it can either translate the literalness, giving a wordy result, OR, if it has a large enough data base and enoughs smarts, it can try to find the matching metaphor in the target language - either is fine, depending on the qualities you are looking for in your translation. Lojban lujvo used in everyday speech will probably not include things like an exact match for English 'plowed', since you have to get a little too figurative for my way of thinking. So a lujvo used in translating this phrase will be different from the words a fluent Lojbanist would use in communicating with another Lojabnist about the manner of a ship's moving. lojbab >From jennings@halcyon.halcyon.com Thu Jun 17 12:07:56 1993 Message-Id: <199306171001.AA12844@halcyon.com> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1993 03:09:32 -0800 To: conlang@diku.dk From: jennings@halcyon.halcyon.com (James Jennings) Subject: Re: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) wrote: >There are basically five ways to translate a metaphor... >3. Translate the metaphor into an equivalent metaphor in the target >language. ... this will not work for an IAL, unless all of your listeners >are native speakers of language X. Those of us who believe that metaphor is at the heart of any *living* language have an out here. A *living* IAL would have it's own collection of metaphors. The idea is that, without metaphor, a language can only grow by descrete acts of it's planning committee, which means it can't grow at all. With metaphor, translation involving an IAL is, in principle, no easier or harder than any other kind of translation. James Jennings *** jennings@halcyon.com *** 70740.1237@compuserve.com >From mnu@inel.gov Thu Jun 17 21:08:36 1993 Date: Thu, 17 Jun 93 13:07:46 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306171907.AA00349@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? Howdy conlangers! James Jennings writes: > > Those of us who believe that metaphor is at the heart of any > *living* language have an out here. A *living* IAL would have it's > own collection of metaphors. > This would be an ideal solution if it were workable. However, as I stated in an earlier post on this subject to the Lojban List: The only way metaphor will work properly is if the metaphoric system of the conlang is PRECISELY defined. In effect, you must provide a "syntax and semantics" for the metaphor of your language. Since a comprehensive analysis of the metaphoric system of a NATURAL language has never been done (to my knowledge), I doubt if providing such a system for a conlang is technically feasible. > > The idea is that, without metaphor, a language can only grow by > descrete acts of it's planning committee, which means it can't grow > at all. > This is simply not true. First of all, any properly designed language will allow the creation of new words by concatenation of existing morphemes (i.e., compounds and derivations) and the introduction of new morphemes. Natural languages use both methods. The use of metaphor is NEVER the only solution. Furthermore, if the lexical semantics of the IAL is both robust and precise (i.e., the precision and robustness are built into the language), the language can have unlimited room for growth without the need for resorting to metaphor. > > With metaphor, translation involving an IAL is, in > principle, no easier or harder than any other kind of translation. > Actually, it's much easier using metaphor, since you can then translate much more literally from your native language. This is great if you're a beginner. The fact that you will be misunderstood, though, should give you pause. You seem to have missed the major point of my posts. If you are speaking in an IAL, then your audience is potentially multi-national, almost by definition. If you use metaphor in an IAL, then the listener will interpret the metaphor in a way that is natural for him, which can be quite different from what you intend. Natural language translation involves translation into only ONE language, and the translator (if he's good enough) will translate a metaphor in the most appropriate way, as I discussed in my last post. With an IAL, you are effectively translating into ALL natural languages, and a metaphor that makes perfect sense to you and other English speakers may be gibberish to someone whose native language is not English. The purpose of an IAL is to communicate across normal language barriers. If you use the metaphors of your native language, you will FAIL to communicate. This is a simple linguistic fact of life. I don't like it anymore than you do. :-( Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From martyb@vnet.IBM.COM Fri Jun 18 00:27:20 1993 Message-Id: <9306172227.AA15023@odin.diku.dk> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 93 16:25:46 MDT From: "Martin R. Bartels" To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? Howdy all! In response to Rick Morneau and James Jennings: Rick, I'm not sure, but I think that you are missing James's point. His point (as I read it) is *not* that an IAL should reflect the metaphor of "all" natural languages, it *can't* (as you have stated). However, if the IAL develops its own metaphor, then there is no more problem than that of choosing how to translate metaphor between "natural" languages - which can be done if equivalent metaphor exists. So far, I'm not taking sides (or at least not by intent), but Rick, I think that you missed James's point. That in spite of all the prior metaphor discussion you posted. I am still waiting to hear a decisive argument one way or the other. As yet, I haven't found one. Please note, I said "decisive", not "sound" or "solid" - there have been many good arguments made! So far, in writing people in Europe, Nepal and Nigeria, I haven't had any problems with metaphor per se. I'm writing in Esperanto. However, I have had the occational problem with forgetting to render idiom in a clear way - simply because I didn't recognize it as idiom until I got a "huh?" in the mail.... ---Marty (Bartels, ) >From B645ZAW@UTARLG.UTA.EDU Fri Jun 18 18:45:53 1993 Date: 18 Jun 1993 08:04:03 -0600 (CST) From: STEPHEN TICE Subject: Re: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? To: conlang@diku.dk Message-Id: <01GZIJBQTQTE001HNO@UTARLG.UTA.EDU> X-Vms-To: IN%"conlang@diku.dk" X-Vms-Cc: B645ZAW Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Rick, Marty, & conlang coterie, This ain't hard. The essential mechanism of metaphor is setting up a relationship between things -- "which can never be" (Carse). Fog skulking about on cat's feet, and the like. Leaves a pregnant space for reader imagination to come into play. Not unlike having adequate white-space around the edge of a poem to move-around and stretch-out in. Course the trick for a master of poesis, seems to be to guide the reader into an area of mutual interest, which one can then flesh out on their own. So for translation -- the relation between concepts will be just as impossible -- yet masterful artistry will require knowing some- thing about your target audience's conceptions, so as to get them into the right ballpark. It's just no good unless the reader provides their own "personal" meaning. Thus, metaphor remains midwifery no matter how delivered. Pair ASL signs for "newspaper" and "shoes" as an example... you still get ... puppies in suburbia, or poverty in the streets or on the farm, or ??? (A shrewd use of the tea-leaves effect.) Should pose no problem to loglan -- since the inherent impossibility is what prompts the dip into one's own experiences in search of some semblance of meaning -- which is the intended response. I suggest then that the focus for translation should key on maintaining the impossibility. (Reminds me of eliciting a kind of neural resonance, where the associated concepts never become coincident, else the subjective effort is lost.) Automatic translation seems like no major hurdle either. The association "field" between a metaphor's =unlikely concept pairings= will likely remain just as fuzzy. (cp. snow on tv, clouds in the sky, or inkblots) Art being mostly subjective, that is. And metaphor being a tar-baby in this regard. | -- J -- | | stephen (Proverbs 21:20 / 22:14 / 23:5) >From EVERSON%IRLEARN.UCD.IE@vm.uni-c.dk Fri Jun 18 20:21:26 1993 Date: Fri, 18 Jun 93 19:20:33 GMT From: Michael Everson Subject: List To: Constructed Languages list Who is the listowner of ConLang? Michael Everson School of Architecture, UCD; Richview, Clonskeagh; Dublin 14; E/ire Phone: +353 1 706-2745 Fax: +353 1 283-8908 Home: +353 1 478-2597 >From jennings@halcyon.halcyon.com Mon Jun 21 02:35:28 1993 Message-Id: <199306210028.AA16953@halcyon.com> Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1993 17:37:08 -0800 To: conlang@diku.dk From: jennings@halcyon.halcyon.com (James Jennings) Subject: Re: Is there help for metaphorophiliacs? Rick Morneau writes: > The only way metaphor will work properly is if the metaphoric > system of the conlang is PRECISELY defined. I question what you might mean by "properly" (for who? for what purpose?) and I quibble with your use of "PRECISELY" (isn't there a "good enough"?) but otherwise, I agree that you need to define a metaphoric system. > In effect, you must provide a "syntax and semantics" > for the metaphor of your language. Minor quibble: Don't count on a metaphoric system looking anything like "syntax and semantics". > Since a comprehensive analysis of the metaphoric system > of a NATURAL language has never been done (to my knowledge), I > doubt if providing such a system for a conlang is technically > feasible. I doubt that a living, metaphor-free AL is technically feasable, so we better start working on that metaphoric system. >First of all, any properly designed language >will allow the creation of new words by concatenation of existing >morphemes (i.e., compounds and derivations) and the introduction of >new morphemes. So the way a language grows is by inventing new words? I doubt that's enough. (It reminds me of the aphorism, "Just because you've named it doesn't mean you understand it.") I used to think that syntax and morphemes were all that we needed. Now I see them as imperfect models of only part of what is really going on. >You seem to have missed the major point of my posts. Then we're even. Martin R. Bartels writes: (while trying to paraphrase me) >However, if the IAL develops its own metaphor, then there is no more >problem than that of choosing how to translate metaphor between >"natural" languages - which can be done if equivalent metaphor exists. I can only add my (unproven) conviction that the IAL *will* develop its own metaphor (whether you design it in or not) or it will die of constipation. If you want automated translation, you had better design the metaphors in. It seems to me, Rick, that you have a very clear mental model of what your IAL is like which is in conflict with my model of what is humanly possible. I suspect we will have to agree to disagree until we have either an IAL or a workable theory of metaphor. James James Jennings *** jennings@halcyon.com *** 70740.1237@compuserve.com >From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Tue Jun 22 22:18:09 1993 Message-Id: From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) Subject: Ghost words To: conlang@diku.dk (conlang) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1993 10:00:14 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1182 This topic is peripheral to constructed languages, but I think it's fun anyway. A "ghost word" is one that appears as a result of an error, typographical or otherwise, and then becomes perpetuated in dictionaries despite never having been used anywhere. One example is the word >dord<, which appeared in the Merriam-Webster 2nd International Dictionary of 1934 as a synonym for >density<. It resulted from a misreading of the scribbled notation "D or d", meaning that "density" could be abbreviated as either "D" or "d". When discovered, >dord< was promptly removed from later printings, but it had already propagated into other dictionaries. The poet Robert Browning was much criticized for using obscure words in his early poetry, and even for making them up on occasion. Later in life, he thought of a suitable word (I've forgotten what it was) for a particular poem, and decided to play it safe by looking it up. The word was listed: all well so far. Then he checked the illustrative quotation, and found that the only cited use was in an early work by Robert Browning! -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban. >From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-a.bcc.ac.uk Wed Jun 23 21:06:09 1993 From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta) Message-Id: <9306231905.AA37070@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Ghost words In-Reply-To: (Your message of Tue, 22 Jun 93 23:19:41 O.) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 93 20:05:32 +0100 Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk > The poet Robert Browning was much criticized for using obscure words in his > early poetry, and even for making them up on occasion. Later in life, he > thought of a suitable word (I've forgotten what it was) for a particular > poem, and decided to play it safe by looking it up. The word was listed: > all well so far. Then he checked the illustrative quotation, and found > that the only cited use was in an early work by Robert Browning! I've always found it endearing that Robert, chaste of mind, thought he had a word for a nun's headdress when he wrote at the end of _Pippa passes_ (I quote from memory): monks and nuns, cowls and twats --- And >From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jun 24 13:20:53 1993 Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1993 12:20:46 +0100 Message-Id: <15751.199306241120@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Thu, 24 Jun 1993 12:20:46 +0100 To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Re: Ghost words Thus And: >I've always found it endearing that Robert, chaste of mind, thought >he had a word for a nun's headdress when he wrote at the end of >_Pippa passes_ (I quote from memory): > monks and nuns, cowls and twats The line, described by I think Martin Gardner as surely the most notorious malapropism in literature, is owl and bat, cowl and twat but as yo say, it is supposed to have been intended to refer to monks' and nuns' clothing. Colin ======================================================================== There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing lying to you. | University of Bradford There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w) extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk ======================================================================== >From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Thu Jun 24 14:34:21 1993 From: (Mark E. Shoulson) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 93 08:34:17 -0400 Message-Id: <9306241234.AA24611@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk In-Reply-To: Mr Andrew Rosta's message of Wed, 23 Jun 93 21:20:23 +0200 <9306231905.AA37070@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> Subject: Ghost words >I've always found it endearing that Robert, chaste of mind, thought >he had a word for a nun's headdress when he wrote at the end of >_Pippa passes_ (I quote from memory): > monks and nuns, cowls and twats This I *had* to check up. According to my handy-dandy online Oxford English Dictionary: twat (twQt). low slang. Also 8 twait, 20 twot(t. [Of obscure origin.] (See quot. 1727.) [Erroneously used (after quot. 1660) by Browning Pippa Passes IV. ii. 96 under the impression that it denoted some part of a nun's attire. ] 1656 R. FLETCHER tr. Martial II. xliv. 104. 1660 Vanity of Vanities 50 They talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat, They'd send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat. [ ... and so on... ] So Browning sort of had a good reason to be confused. I find this pretty damn funny myself, and am glad you brough it to my attention. The dictionary doesn't bring down the Browning quote, unfortunately. ~mark >From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Thu Jun 24 15:11:54 1993 Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1993 15:11:16 +0200 Content-Identifier: Re: Re: Ghost... From: " (Richard Kennaway)" Message-Id: <13184.9306241311@sys.uea.ac.uk> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Re: Ghost words X-Sender: jrk@139.222.1.5 Colin Fine writes: >The line, described by I think Martin Gardner as surely the most >notorious malapropism in literature, is > > owl and bat, cowl and twat > >but as yo say, it is supposed to have been intended to refer to >monks' and nuns' clothing. The story I read is that his publisher queried the line, and he explained that 'twat' meant a nun's headgear, analogous to a monk's cowl, and that he had found it in an older poem that went (imperfectly quoted from memory): "He thought to have a cardinal's hat They'd sooner have given an old nun's twat." Which seems clear enough. -- ____ Richard Kennaway __\_ / School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \ X/ University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. >From ross@buphy.bu.edu Thu Jun 24 16:02:24 1993 Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1993 10:02:17 -0400 From: John B Ross Message-Id: <199306241402.AA09478@buphy.bu.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: So long for now... I would like to say 'goodbye' _temporarily_ as I leave my present address at Boston University to make a new home in Indiana. I have completed my PhD in physics and will be teaching at the University of Southern Indiana in the fall. As soon as I can, I'll find an Internet link and rejoin this great group. Until then... So long for now! -- John Ross >From doug@netcom.com Thu Jun 24 16:49:16 1993 Message-Id: <9306241449.AA20819@netcom.netcom.com> From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1993 07:49:50 PDT In-Reply-To: John B Ross "So long for now..." (Jun 24, 4:19pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: So long for now... Bye, good luck! Doug >From jim@mycroft.rand.org Thu Jun 24 19:04:35 1993 Message-Id: <9306241704.AA29448@mycroft.rand.org> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: Ghost words In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 24 Jun 93 15:22:36 +0200. <9306241234.AA24611@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> From: Jim Gillogly Reply-To: James_Gillogly@rand.org Date: Thu, 24 Jun 93 10:04:25 PDT Sender: jim@mycroft.rand.org > (Mark E. Shoulson) writes: > So Browning sort of had a good reason to be confused. I find this pretty > damn funny myself, and am glad you brough it to my attention. The > dictionary doesn't bring down the Browning quote, unfortunately. For the sake of definiteness, here it is. It's near the end of IV, with Pippa preparing for bed, after having spent the day inadvertently changing lives as she passes singing. Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's. Oh lark, be day's apostle To mavis, merle and throstle, Bid them their betters jostle From day and its delights! But at night, brother howlet, over the woods, Toll the world to thy chantry; Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods Full complines with gallantry: Then, owls and bats, Cowls and twats, Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods, Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry! As someone else said, it gives one furiously to think. Jim Gillogly 1 Afterlithe S.R. 1993, 17:02 >From rkk@MAIL.LIB.DUKE.EDU Mon Jun 28 17:41:54 1993 Date: Mon, 28 Jun 93 11:38:39 EST From: Randy Kloko Message-Id: <9306281138.A03643@mail.lib.duke.edu> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Questions from New Member I hope someone will help get me up to speed on these questions: 1. When did Loglan become Lojban? What does 'Lojban' mean? (Or more accurately, is it cognate to another word?) 2. How does it differ from the language in the 1975 edition of "Loglan 1"? 3. How widespread is the Klingon fad? I'm on that e-list also, and I'm surprised how active it is. I'd think that a phonemically-challenged, a priori language would be doomed with a capital 'D' (of which there seem to be quite a few in Klingon). Thanks! Randall Kloko Special Collections Library Duke University. >From donh@netcom.com Mon Jun 28 19:36:37 1993 Message-Id: <9306281737.AA28004@netcom2.netcom.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Cc: donh@netcom.com, donh@netcom.com Subject: Re: Questions from New Member In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 28 Jun 93 18:26:13 +0200. <9306281138.A03643@mail.lib.duke.edu> Date: Mon, 28 Jun 93 10:37:08 -0700 From: "Donald J. Harlow" > I hope someone will help get me up to speed on these > questions: > Bob LeChevalier can probably answer these better than I can, but since he has his own axe to grind (like everybody else here), I'll add my two cents worth. Add everything you get together, divide by the number of answers, and you'll probably some out with something fairly close to reality. > 1. When did Loglan become Lojban? What does 'Lojban' mean? > (Or more accurately, is it cognate to another word?) > Loglan did not become Lojban. As I understand it, Bob LeChevalier became disenchanted with certain facets of Loglan (both linguistic and social) and set off to create his own variant of the language. Since Dr. James Cooke Brown had trademarked the name, Bob had to change the name of the language. There was quite a long and bitter feud over the matter, and, I believe, even a court struggle. > 2. How does it differ from the language in the 1975 edition > of "Loglan 1"? > This one I will leave for Bob to answer. > 3. How widespread is the Klingon fad? I'm on that e-list > also, and I'm surprised how active it is. I'd think > that a phonemically-challenged, a priori language would > be doomed with a capital 'D' (of which there seem to be > quite a few in Klingon). > Klingon seems to be fairly popular, but mainly among ST fans. How popular it will remain when Star Trek becomes passe remains to be seen. > Thanks! > > Randall Kloko > Special Collections Library > Duke University. > > >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Jun 29 09:17:00 1993 Date: Tue, 29 Jun 93 03:16:35 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306290716.AA12755@grebyn.com> To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu Subject: response to Randy Kloko on Loglan/Lojban I will post to conlang my prepared FAQ answer on this question following, and will send a few other files to randy giving more details on Lojban that will perhaps better address the differences between Loglan and Lojban (which are actually negligible - they are the same language, except for vocabulary substitution). Note that Don Harlow is only approximately correct. We did not change the name because of JCB's trademark, indeed continued to use 'Loglan' in promoting the language in spite of the trademark claim, and last year succeeded in overturning the trademark claim. JCB and his organization no longer claim Loglan as a trademark, and there is no longer any legal dispute between the two Loglan efforts. We have tried, thus far with little success, to even start talks leasing to more cooperation and perhaps eventual merger of the two efforts. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 For information about the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, please provide a paper-mail address to me via mail or phone. We also have limited introductory information available electronically. The LLG is funded solely by your contributions, which are encouraged for the purpose of defraying our costs (for both electronic and paper distribution.) ================================================ Subject: Loglan and Lojban Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc. Summary: Loglan is alive and well Keywords: AL, Loglan, Lojban, Sapir-Whorf, unambiguous, logical language A response to the query about Loglan. This is a pre-prepared response, since the question is raised frequently. Please feel free to send me a message for more details, or for answers to any questions not answered. The short answer is that Lojban is the current viable version of the artificial language Loglan, supported by The Logical Language Group, Inc., a non-profit organization. Lojban is a public-domain Loglan, with 600-800 supporters depending on how you count, about 120 people claiming to be learning the language, and over a dozen having completed a course and/or otherwise demonstrating skill in the language. Organized activities in the language take place at least weekly in the Washington DC area, with less frequent spontaneous activities elsewhere, and there is an active net mailing list, primarily in English, discussing design, learning, and applications. (Send a message "subscribe lojban firstname lastname" to listserv@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu to subscribe). There is a short quarterly newsletter for inactive followers ($5 +$5/yr) a longer quarterly journal with tutorial materials, translated text, and language design discussions (about $20 +$25/yr). Draft textbook lessons (321 pg - $25+) exist for people who want to learn the language now, along with some CAI software. A completely rewritten textbook and additional software are under development, and significant growth is expected when the book is complete. A dictionary will follow. The inventor of Loglan James Cooke Brown (JCB) is continuing work on a separate version of Loglan. While he does not advertise it as such, much of his language design is considered proprietary, and he claims copyright, royalty and publication rights in his version of the language, and trade secret agreements to get complete language details. To keep his control over the language in the face of 'competition' from Lojban, few supporters of 'Institute Loglan' are given direct access to others, and there is little spontaneous activity going on. There are by latest report 110 supporters, many of whom are supporting both versions of the language. Most of these stem from a largely unsuccessful advertising campaign 1-2 years ago when he published a revision of his book on the language. There are no known speakers, and the few short texts in the language are updates of things written in the 1970's before the split. While I am obviously biased, I firmly believe that this version of Loglan is dead and going nowhere. In any event, the proprietary claims on the language give it little attraction to most potential users of the language. The two versions of the language are close, but drifting slowly apart, with Lojban being a superset of JCB's version with a completely substituted vocabulary list (derived algorithmically in the same manner as the original). Both versions are substantially different from the earlier published versions of the language, with significant known flaws remaining in JCB's version (detailed review available via postal mail or on the Planned Languages Server). More details follow: Loglan is based on predicate logic, and was started in 1955 for the purpose of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Other linguistic research and education applications have been added since, along with computer and AI applications associated with its unambiguous grammar and morphology (flawed in the case of JCB's version.) Loglan was first publically announced in the June 1960 Scientific American. JCB had not completed the language design, and did not for several years to come. However, several science fiction authors took note, most notably Robert Heinlein in 'Moon is a Harsh Mistress'. In 1965 and 1968, limited editions of a book called 'Loglan 1' (L1) were published the latter in microfilm. After several years outside the country, JCB republished L1 and a dictionary called Loglan 4/5 (L4/5) in 1974-5, and incorporated The Loglan Institute, Inc. (TLI). Over the next few years a Loglan journal 'The Loglanist' (TL) was started edited by Dr. John Parks-Clifford, (pc) Professor of Logic at University of Missouri at St. Louis. About 2000 copies of the books were sold, with about 250 purchasers remaining active. Of these perhaps half a dozen temporarily learned the language well enough to carry on conversation with direct assistance from JCB. Meanwhile, JCB sought grants for research from the National Science Foundation and was turned down 3 times, at least partially for irregularities in the proposals as compared to NSF standards. The influx of new people led to many new ideas and the detection of several major problems in the language design. Computer technology, notably that of 'YACC' the UNIX compiler development tool, were applied to Loglan, and the supposedly unambiguous language was found flawed in this aspect. Meanwhile in repsonse to criticism, a more robust way of making compound words that comprise the bulk of the Loglan vocabulary was proposed. The twin redevelopments of the grammar and the morphology paralyzed the language for several years, during which JCB and TLI relied on Loglan supporters to financially keep the project afloat. Shortly after the redevelopment was complete, in the 1982-4 era, there was a big power struggle between JCB and the TLI Board of Directors over control of the language and the organization. JCB won because there was seen to be no hope of completing the language without him, but the bulk of the supporting membership and the most active volunteers dropped out. The new language design was incompletely documented and there was no in-language activity; old Loglanists forgot much of what they had learned. 20% of the root vocabulary and 100% of the compound vocabulary was changed, and there were many changes to the grammar. The journal TL suspended publication, as pc dropped out. JCB virtually alone set about rewriting the language definition, but progress was infinitesimal. In 1986, I (Bob LeChevalier) volunteered to work on a dictionary update, and tried to stimulate new volunteer activity. I was successful, and even got some of the old-timers involved again, but JCB saw this activity as a threat. Nora Tansky (now my wife) and I completed an MS-DOS based flash-card vocabulary program. JCB insisted that we sign a copyright acknowledgement and agree to pay royalties, claiming copyright on the individual words of the language. Legal threats followed, and the mass of Loglan volunteers decided to reinvent a public domain vocabulary and grammar while seeking a negotiated solution. Negotiations failed, and the legal threats culminated in a trademark registration battle, recently won by us, with a ruling that 'Loglan' was a generic name. Lojban design has been completed and we have an active if cash-poor organization with language students on 3 continents. To sum up, the underlying dispute is over whether an artificial language can hope to succeed if its inventor tries to control its development too closely, whether intellectual property claims are valid given that they are being raised after people had contributed time and money for years without such claims, and whether people will support a language when information is kept secret from them. This is a historically recurring battle in the history of artificial languages. To the extent any AL has succeeded, it has been through openness and letting the language supporters control the language. I will be happy to respond to questions on any of the above. Details and documentation are enormous as I maintain as complete an archive as posible. ---- lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 lojbab@grebyn.com For information about Lojban, please provide a snail-post address to me via mail or phone. We are funded solely by contributions, which are encouraged for the purpose of defraying our costs, but are not mandatory. >From lojbab@grebyn.com Tue Jun 29 09:35:37 1993 Date: Tue, 29 Jun 93 03:35:17 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306290735.AA13007@grebyn.com> To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Subject: templates and fluent language use, and a Lojban exercise for all Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu [The following was written before I saw Veijo's posting today on Lojban List, which strikes me as another example of the type of exercise I am proposing. I have suggested to Veijo that he ask people to respond to him privately and summarize, per the discussion at the end of this posting, but don't let that stop anyone from trying it. Some of Frank Schulz's writings of the last few weeks may also be amenable as beginners exercises of the desired form.] I may have had an insight in the Lojban language learning problem which is applicable to designing and learning other conlangs (and maybe to learning natlangs as well). A little cursory test of the hypothesis for Lojbanists occurs at the end of this posting. Some repsonses from people of various levels of Lojban knowledge might tell me a lot. I WANT SOME RESPONSES FROM BEGINNERS (who have the Lojban word lists), please, so if the bulk of this posting loses you, just skip to the end, and respond to me on the one point. Last week in Lojban conversation session here in DC, Nora attempted to describe a situation or thought exercise (which I will leave unstated for now), in Lojban. She found it difficult to phrase the problem, and those of us listening to her, found that with the exception of one tanru, we had no idea what she was talking about. She then expressed the problem in English, and I have to admit that it was not easy to do so clearly in English either. This has continued to trouble her: if Lojban is viable as a language, then these tricky problems of expression (only, through the window, etc.) need to have formulaic solutions that so not have to be thought out everytime you want to use them. In expressing this to me tonight, she reminded me of someone's recent comment either on Lojban List or on conlang, that in acquiring fluent speech in a language, you must acquire not only thousands of words, but some large and indeterminate number of grammatical sentence and phrase templates that you can quickly drop words into to express what you want. The person who mentioned this theory indicated that the number of such templates may be in the several hundreds of thousands. I'm inclined to believe the number is much smaller, that the templates are not rigidly formed, and are of two (or maybe three levels). But I'm instinbctively inclined to think that the templatization of language is indeed the correct explanation for language grammar. Sentence level templates may be only a few dozen even in a highly word-order dependent language like English or Lojban. In Lojban, choice of VSO, SVO observative, prenexes, negations, question and imperative constructions seem to me to be the typical thing at this level. At this point, there are probably fewer such templates than there will eventually be. I think that things like "only" that have really bothered me will eventually be handled by a few kinds of sentence level template. Templates may be far more numerous at the phrase level than at the sentence level. Indeed, a large protion of these may be the variety of prepositional phrases or distinct prepositional meanings (i.e. prepositions multiplied by the number of distinct cases/semantics that apply to those cases) that can be glued onto a sentence. There are indeed many of these, but in terms of general semantic nature, I suspect that the numbers are in the hundreds rather than multi-thousands. We have a few dozen BAI words, each having several potential applications in a Lojban sentence based on the place structure of a corresponding brivla, but typically only one of those places dominates use of the word. Other uses will depend on fi'o, or on more drastic modification of sentence templates. There may be a few dozen essential patterns of tanru-making that will allow tanru to be quickly and easily expressed, and to be understood just as readily. jimc and Nick have postulated that most lujvo fit into one of only 5 or so categories of structures which jimc calls dikyjvo; I think there may be more, but the numbers are still small compared to the number of BAI. Other oft-used phrase-level constructions have few variations: abstraction clauses, relative clauses, logical and non-logical connection between various components, and most uses of numbers and measurements at the conversational (as opposed to technical mekso) level. I would also add in some of the patterns of place structures found in the language; i.e. that destination places typically appear before origins before routes/means. I think with a good command of a several dozen sentence templates (most of the actively writing and speaking Lojbanists seem to have acquired these to a considerable extent) which will help you express a general category of expression, and a better repetoire of short template phrases of sumti and tanru length that can plug into these templates, the combinatorial power of the language will approach that needed for spontaneous fluent expression. The total numbers of templates of all levels may be on the order of magnitude of the number of gismu, and the number of cmavo, i.e. around 1000. Indeed the fact that so many conlangs end up with lists of words around a thousand long, suggests to me that there is something about that approximate level that tracks with the order of complexity of our brains. Take 1000 gismu, 1000 cmavo, and 1000 quick-templates of sentence or phrase length, and you have a very powerful language. Supporting evidence is that I can manage fairly fluent Russian conversation with my kids (within the limited range of topics I converse with them on) with less than 1000 words vocabulary, and probably only several dozen cmavo (I count Russian declensions and conjugations as cmavo-like in nature, or the number would be smaller), and only a few sentence-like templates mainly dealing with word order. I think an increase of vocabulary on my part by a factor of 2 or 3, and perhaps twice the number of templates I now have (especially roots, and the templates that allow productive word-building from roots), would allow be to hold my own in conversation with a Russian adult, if not fluently or native-like. My Lojban skill lags behind my Russian skill in that I cannot speak fluently with anyone. I think that if there WERE a 6 year old Lojban speaker, I could quickly learn to converse fluently with them in the way I do Russian. But we do Lojban conversation conversation and writing with other adults, indeed adults of above average intelligence and education for the most part, and thus have higher needs and expectations. Thus we need to develop those templates, lots of them, and find ways to rapidly learn them. Interestingly, this pointed Nora back to 4 years ago, when Tommy Whitlock, a natural polyglot who helped us build the gismu list, became frustrated at the lack of what could best then be described as idiomatic patterns that he could memorize for everyday conversational use. I think what he was missing was these templates, which we (and Tommy especially) probably acquire instinctively through repetition of the more commonly used idiomatic phrases. I am thus now more convinced that exercises like the 'phone game' that we did last year (good for intermediate Lojbanists but too tough for beginners), '20 questions' like we did the year before (excellent for beginners), and debates like 'only', 'place deletion', 'through the window', and yes jimc, even dikyjvo, are particularly useful NOT in giving us 'rules' for the language or text in the language, but rather for developing and learning these templates that move us beyond thinking at the word level, to thinking at the phrase and sentence level, that will help us get to the next step in language learning, and in Lojban's inherent sophistication as a language. I am thus interested in ideas from people to help us make a more comprehensive list of templates of various levels, and maybe some way of recording them to make them available for direct study. More important are ideas for teaching these templates - especially beginning level games like '20 questions' (maybe children's nursery rhymes and songs, and aphorisms, fit in this category, at which point we may be able to understand how to write our own LOJBAN nursery rhymes and aphorisms rather than translating English ones, based on the template(s) we are trying to exercise. Maybe a few more like 'phone game' as well will be good, but there is clearly more frustration among beginners trying to get to that first level of expression that some of us have reached than there is among those of us who can communicate but are plateaued considerably short of fluency. I am one of the better Lojban speakers/writers NOT because I am good at languages - I'm pretty poor based on what I've seen others do. (Hmm. As an example of approximateness of templates, I just 'fluently' wrote that last clause as "I'm pretty poor from what I've seen others do", only to recognize that "from" was too vague and to quickly replace it with the more exact "based on". Both alternatives work to convey the meaning, but the final form seems less likely to confuse a reader, especially a non-fluent English speaker.) Rather, I think that I have recognized a few more templates than most people, possibly because in doing the primary design work on inventing the lists of gismu and cmavo, especially those categories like the BAI and UI words, I often started with template-like English expression problems. I thus have confidence that non-fluently, I can express most anything in Lojban building on patterns I have used before. I've been doing this for a while, but haven't identified what I was doing until tonight. Tonight, Nora re-expressed in English a particularly tough part of the expression she was trying to convey last week, which none of us understood. Once I understood Nora's English statement of the communication problem, I found it relatively trivial to come up with several ways to express it, stumbling a little bit on fluency of word-choice, but essentially firing back an answer to her translation exercise as fast as she had phrased it in English, and I realized that I dod it so fast BECAUSE I was using templates. What is unclear of course, is whether my quick formulaic response was communicative, since she already knew what I was trying to say. ================================================= Lojbanists of all levels, please email me privately with your attempt at an English translation of the following (preferably colloquial English), and I'll summarize onto Lojban List after several days (probably after LogFest, so I can try it on people there). Commentary on other aspects of this posting need not wait for the summary. [Hmm. This may indeed be one of the teaching 'games' I'm looking for. How about the more experienced Lojbanists coming up with 1-2 sentences of Lojban, whether natural communicative problems or aphorisms/quotes. Post it and collect responses translating it to English. I think this is the essence of the teaching that was going on in the 'phone game', and it removes the timing problems, and the problems some beginning Lojbanists had in going from English to Lojban as weaknesses. Beginners can probably do fine in going from Lojban back to English. (Advanced Lojban students should be composing directly in Lojban, as I am doing here, rather than translating an English sentence directly.) Unlike the phone game, there is a measure of success - the number of people of various levels, espeically beginners, who can figure out what you were trying to say; with the phone game, there was only one such person, of a particular Lojban skill level, who could make or break your effort. If what you write can't be understood by SEVERAL Lojbanists as you intended it to be understood, though, you have not expressed the idea as well as you need to do so to be communcatively competent.] =================================================================== text - note no lujvo this time to make life easier??? for beginners =================================================================== mi vimcu pa le re pelji senta le slanu be lo kalci vimcu pelji la'u pa djine klani lojbab >From mnu@inel.gov Tue Jun 29 16:13:26 1993 Date: Tue, 29 Jun 93 08:11:47 MDT From: mnu@inel.gov (Rick Morneau) Message-Id: <9306291411.AA00174@ nairobi.inel.gov.inel.gov > Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63) To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: templates and fluent language use... Bob LeChevalier writes: > > I may have had an insight in the Lojban language learning problem > which is applicable to designing and learning other conlangs > ... > Last week in Lojban conversation session here in DC, Nora attempted > to describe a situation or thought exercise (which I will leave > unstated for now), in Lojban. She found it difficult to phrase the > problem, and those of us listening to her, found that with the > exception of one tanru, we had no idea what she was talking about. > ... > she reminded me of someone's recent comment either on Lojban List > or on conlang, that in acquiring fluent speech in a language, you > must acquire not only thousands of words, but some large and > indeterminate number of grammatical sentence and phrase templates > that you can quickly drop words into to express what you want. The > person who mentioned this theory indicated that the number of such > templates may be in the several hundreds of thousands. > Actually, the number is much more than that, depending on how large you make the forms, and on how much recursion you allow. Perhaps in the hundreds of millions. Fortunately, we don't have to learn these templates (except for the irregular and idiosyncratic forms, and the loglans should not have ANY of these). All we've got to do is learn the grammar, which is much easier. Has it occurred to you, Bob, that the problem is with the grammar of Lojban? Especially the gismu? After all, natural languages do not have predicates even remotely resembling the predicates of the loglans. By going against basic linguistic universals, you may have created a complex and inherently unlearnable coding game, rather than a real language. It may be great for testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but your experience seems to show that it may be impossible to become fluent. I don't think it's possible to deviate so far from natural languages, and end up with a real, learnable language. By the way, have you thought of using Lojban as a test of Chomsky's claim that linguistic ability is inherently innate; i.e., that language form depends heavily on the structure and function of our brains, and that, as a result, languages are limited in the form that a grammar can take? Since loglans are so totally different from natural languages, the ability of a human to learn a loglan fluently would, in my opinion, provide convincing evidence that innateness is bogus. Although this post may seem somewhat confrontational (and I apologize if it does), I'm not doing it to start a fight. I am sincerely asking if you have seriously considered that loglans may, in fact, be inherently unlearnable. Regards, Rick -- *=*= Disclaimer: The INEL does not speak for me and vice versa =*=* = Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory = * mnu@inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415, USA * =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= NeXT Mail accepted here! *=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= >From lojbab@grebyn.com Wed Jun 30 06:17:19 1993 Date: Wed, 30 Jun 93 00:17:13 EDT From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group) Message-Id: <9306300417.AA06984@grebyn.com> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: templates and fluent language use... In response to Rick, yes, I have considered the possibility, and it may indeed be the case that loglans may be unlearnable. This is NOT the implication of my experiences, and indeed what I've experienced in learning Russian has INCREASED my confidence in acquiring Lojban fluency, as well as thinking that I've achieved some significant (if not yet testable) insight on learning any language. As a side note, before preceding, I know of no STATED language universal that Loglan/Lojban inherently violates. JCB many years ago did a specific study of the sets of universals posed in the 60s and 70s (references escape me now), and verefied that all universals either were met, or were conditionals where Loglan did not meet the antecedent. Our policy since working on Lojban version has been to expand possibilities of the language to ensure that we envelope multiple possibilities where there is a likelihood of a universal, thereby allowing whichever of several forms is most 'natural' to eventually take the fore. It is true that there is no predicate natlang, so one could state this as an inherent universal thus implying tyat there cannot be. But as Gilson has noted, it is possible (though I persoanlly think fallacious) to view all Loglan/Lojban predicates as verbs, resulting in a system not too unlike Chinese. As to the fluency question, I know what I have achieved with Lojban, and how little time I spend on the language (in actual usage) to achieve and maintain my skill. I know by comparison how much effort I am putting forth in Russian. The latter, I am working MUCH more intensely at, and the effects of trying to be communicative in all usages - it ain't just an experiment or a toy, seems to also be significant. I make MANY errors in my more fluent Russian; I make fewer errors in my less fluent Lojban. I have little doubt that IF I tackled Lojban the same way I do Russian, and even English - using the language as the primary or sole means of communication for significant periods of time, and worrying about getting the communication across at all costs rather than what I do (which is to conscentrate on doing it RIGHT, since I'm stuck with being an example to everyone else). The way we have been learning Lojban is NOT the way kids learn natlangs, and I suspect NOT the way most adults who successfully learn natlangs do so. Instead, we study Lojban the way I studied German back in higgh school: I took a German astronomy book, adn a dictionary, and tried to read the book. I ususally managed to puzzle things out, but gained little insight that allowed me to skip dictionary work on new words or usages. The text was simply beyond my capability in German, and I learned how to efficientky look up words in a dictionary, and NOT how to read German. Most people who really learn languages don't have a dictionary in hand all the time, and when they do, they cannot and do not take time to look them up. Most Lojbanists tend to be unwilling to try to write something or read something without looking up some or all of the words, and their fluency is thus going to limited to their lookup speed. I myself have gone to the step of NOT looking most things up with Lojban, indeed avoiding doing so even when I could take the time. Unfortunately, the freq8uency of my doing so is rare, and msot of the people who would respond to me have less command of t the vocabulary and hence either need to look up words, or have me go back and paraphrases many times toill they get what I'm saying (or usually we give up and just tell them to keep things moving - unfortunately, most adults are more interest in finding out the content of a statement than in the process of figurinng it out. Thus, when Nora's attempt to express her statement failed last week, and no one understood, she either made one rather half hearted attempt to paraphrase, or told us immediately what she had been trying for, in order to solicit our advice (I can't remember whether she made that second effort). Since she had trouble even getting across the idea in English (not with fluency, but with the our imagery of the way she chose to phrase it in English), we never really managed to solve the problem of how to express it in Lojban (until I tried it last night from a fresh start). On the other hand, as positive evidence, back in 1987 on our hoineymoon, Nora anand I DID try to speak Lojban-only, communciatively for an hour, using what was then only a 300 word vocabulary apiece - and not the same words since we were using LogFlash with random ordering to study. The way I felt then when we communciated is indeed similar to the way I feel in speaking Russian to my kids - there's a kind of 'aha!', I'm doing it feeling that seems to settle in, and a whole different strategy to communciation. Alas, even Nora and I haven't tried it again since then, though we have occassionally done Lojban conversations with no wordlists - we have usually had others around who were being taught and/or brought up to our level, and who did not have the confidence or knowledge or something that was needed to make things work. It is my hope/intent to make a new attempt at LogFest in 2 weeks, or possibly later this year to have a real no-holds-barred natural communciation session wioth no English permitted. If we actually do the test, i think we'll be pleased with the results. But we still need those templates to have totally fluent speech - there is still too often the need to say something that we want to say, and can easily say in English, butr which has never been said in Loglan/Lojban. That first time is a problem, and we will eventually overcome it. lojbab >From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Wed Jun 30 23:34:54 1993 From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk) Message-Id: <9306302133.AA22981@brick.purchase.edu> Subject: Re: Ghost words To: conlang@diku.dk Date: Wed, 30 Jun 93 17:33:13 EDT In-Reply-To: <9306241704.AA29448@mycroft.rand.org>; from "Jim Gillogly" at Jun 24, 93 9:23 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Jim Gillogly says: : Jim Gillogly : 1 Afterlithe S.R. 1993, 17:02 Great signature, but how do you relate 24 June (or thereabouts; that's the date my mailer says I recieved this) to 1 Afterlithe? I'd expect it to be sometime during Forelithe. -- =============================================================================== marnen/laibow-koser/laibow@brick.purchase.edu/state/university/of/new/york/at/ purchase/box/1649/735/anderson/hill/road/purchase/new/york/10577/united/states/ of/america/practice/random/kindness/and/senseless/acts/of/beauty!/ ===============================================================================