I was involved with Loglan and Lojban (which forked from Loglan) years ago, and learnt some of both, although never to the point of being able to use them without constant recourse to the dictionary.
I found it useful, not so much for using, but for some ways it provides of looking at the constructions of any human language. In English, you can say that something is “good”. The equivalent Lo**an word—let’s assume it’s “gudbi”—is at least a 4-place relation: X1 is better than X2 for purpose X3 by standard X4. You can still say “da gudbi”—“X1 is good”—but the empty 2nd, 3rd, and 4th places are available for anyone to immediately ask “better than what?”, “better for what purpose?”, etc. Most Lo**an content words (“bridi”, in Lojban teminology) are multi-place relations that take as many arguments as the vocabulary designers decided was necessary to their meaning. English, in contrast, grammatically imposes the number: 1 for nouns (“X is a door”) and simple adjectives (“X is good”), 2 for comparative adjectives (“X is better than Y”), and 2 or 3 for verbs (“I saw him”, “I gave him a book”).
Another example is the definite article. What does “the” mean in English? The nearest equivalent Lo**an word means “that specific individual which I intend to designate by the following description”, and it is up to the speaker to choose a description that communicates to the listener which individual that is.
In English, you can say that something is “good”. The equivalent Lo**an word—let’s assume it’s “gudbi”—is at least a 4-place relation...
Actually, if your hypothetical four-place word is the nearest equivalent, wouldn’t it be technically true to say that one can’t, or at least can’t simply, describe something as having-the-innate-quality-of-goodness in Lo* at all? That’s how I understood it to work, and it was one of the things I liked about the language when I was studying it.
Of course, people who have the idea that goodness can be an innate quality will try to use it that way anyway, regardless of correctness. How does the Lojban community handle that kind of thing?
And since I’m asking, is it possible to describe something as having-the-innate-quality-of-goodness (as opposed to having the innate quality of tending to be better for most uses than most other things) in Lojban? How?
Actually, if your hypothetical four-place word is the nearest equivalent, wouldn’t it be technically true to say that one can’t, or at least can’t simply, describe something as having-the-innate-quality-of-goodness in Lo* at all? That’s how I understood it to work, and it was one of the things I liked about the language when I was studying it.
In effect, yes. The four argument-places of “gudbi” are always there. You never have to fill in any of them, but leaving a place syntactically empty means not that there is nothing there semantically, but that it is filled by whatever you intend fills it. By omitting to say what, you are assuming that it will be clear to your listener from context. Most adjectives—that is, predicates that correspond to English adjectives—are comparative in Lojban. They mean “X1 is more (whatever) than X2 (perhaps with additional places)”.
Of course, people who have the idea that goodness can be an innate quality will try to use it that way anyway, regardless of correctness. How does the Lojban community handle that kind of thing?
It’s been a while, so you’d have to ask the Lojbanists themselves about that. If you wanted to say this explicitly, you’d end up with some circumlocution that would back-translate as something like “this is-an-example-of the-mass-of-good-things”, and even then, the listener can still come back with “gudbi ie”, or “better than what?”, just as readily as the English sentence “I gave” immediately suggests the questions “what? and to whom?”
I like this idea. Maybe some of us should embark on a project to learn Lojban together. If we want a concrete goal, it could culminate in translating a couple of Sequence posts. That would be a way to demonstrate our skills while also seeing how easily rationalist writing can be translated to a rationalist language.
I started to, but didn’t get very far. I might pick it up again at some point—it’s definitely interesting how different it is from what I’m used to, and it seems to actually be a bit closer to how I naturally think in some, but not all, ways. (In fact, it’s close enough that I should probably rethink my claim that I don’t think in language—I certainly don’t think in English, but how I think isn’t all that much farther from English than Lojban is.)
So how many people reading have actually learnt Lojban?
(I think there’s one person actually interested in Lojban on RW …)
I was involved with Loglan and Lojban (which forked from Loglan) years ago, and learnt some of both, although never to the point of being able to use them without constant recourse to the dictionary.
I found it useful, not so much for using, but for some ways it provides of looking at the constructions of any human language. In English, you can say that something is “good”. The equivalent Lo**an word—let’s assume it’s “gudbi”—is at least a 4-place relation: X1 is better than X2 for purpose X3 by standard X4. You can still say “da gudbi”—“X1 is good”—but the empty 2nd, 3rd, and 4th places are available for anyone to immediately ask “better than what?”, “better for what purpose?”, etc. Most Lo**an content words (“bridi”, in Lojban teminology) are multi-place relations that take as many arguments as the vocabulary designers decided was necessary to their meaning. English, in contrast, grammatically imposes the number: 1 for nouns (“X is a door”) and simple adjectives (“X is good”), 2 for comparative adjectives (“X is better than Y”), and 2 or 3 for verbs (“I saw him”, “I gave him a book”).
Another example is the definite article. What does “the” mean in English? The nearest equivalent Lo**an word means “that specific individual which I intend to designate by the following description”, and it is up to the speaker to choose a description that communicates to the listener which individual that is.
Actually, if your hypothetical four-place word is the nearest equivalent, wouldn’t it be technically true to say that one can’t, or at least can’t simply, describe something as having-the-innate-quality-of-goodness in Lo* at all? That’s how I understood it to work, and it was one of the things I liked about the language when I was studying it.
Of course, people who have the idea that goodness can be an innate quality will try to use it that way anyway, regardless of correctness. How does the Lojban community handle that kind of thing?
And since I’m asking, is it possible to describe something as having-the-innate-quality-of-goodness (as opposed to having the innate quality of tending to be better for most uses than most other things) in Lojban? How?
In effect, yes. The four argument-places of “gudbi” are always there. You never have to fill in any of them, but leaving a place syntactically empty means not that there is nothing there semantically, but that it is filled by whatever you intend fills it. By omitting to say what, you are assuming that it will be clear to your listener from context. Most adjectives—that is, predicates that correspond to English adjectives—are comparative in Lojban. They mean “X1 is more (whatever) than X2 (perhaps with additional places)”.
It’s been a while, so you’d have to ask the Lojbanists themselves about that. If you wanted to say this explicitly, you’d end up with some circumlocution that would back-translate as something like “this is-an-example-of the-mass-of-good-things”, and even then, the listener can still come back with “gudbi ie”, or “better than what?”, just as readily as the English sentence “I gave” immediately suggests the questions “what? and to whom?”
I might be interested in learning Lojban if a group of people I interact with daily would learn it with me.
I like this idea. Maybe some of us should embark on a project to learn Lojban together. If we want a concrete goal, it could culminate in translating a couple of Sequence posts. That would be a way to demonstrate our skills while also seeing how easily rationalist writing can be translated to a rationalist language.
I started to, but didn’t get very far. I might pick it up again at some point—it’s definitely interesting how different it is from what I’m used to, and it seems to actually be a bit closer to how I naturally think in some, but not all, ways. (In fact, it’s close enough that I should probably rethink my claim that I don’t think in language—I certainly don’t think in English, but how I think isn’t all that much farther from English than Lojban is.)