Lojban In General

I wonder to what extent eastern languages are more consistent and
simple to learn that English, and whether that has played a minor role
in the relatively low representation of those languages in the Lojban
community. (The major role, of course, being that Lojban wasn't
developed in Japan or India and has little-to-no foreign language
learning or reference material.)

I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe a
cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as much
as a cumbersome grammar does. And other eastern countries have
reformed orthographies or (maybe?) haven't used ideographs in
centuries or more. But I don't really know much about those.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

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On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 06:08:47PM -0500, Chris Capel wrote:
> I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe
> a cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as
> much as a cumbersome grammar does.

It sure as hell bugs *me*, and I'm pretty logically minded.

The only nice thing about Japanese is the regular verb conjugation
and the lack of noun conjugation (I can't remember what it's called
with nouns).

-Robin

--
Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo
Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 18:00 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 06:08:47PM -0500, Chris Capel wrote:
> > I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe
> > a cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as
> > much as a cumbersome grammar does.
>
> It sure as hell bugs *me*, and I'm pretty logically minded.
>
> The only nice thing about Japanese is the regular verb conjugation
> and the lack of noun conjugation (I can't remember what it's called
> with nouns).
>

Declension

> -Robin
>

--
Bob Slaughter, rslauGUESS@WHATmindspring.com
http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/
North Georgia Modurail: http://www.trainweb.org/northgamodurail/
In which language of the world does the word 'taxi' mean "I cannot drive"?

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 20:00, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 06:08:47PM -0500, Chris Capel wrote:
>> I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe
>> a cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as
>> much as a cumbersome grammar does.
>
> It sure as hell bugs *me*, and I'm pretty logically minded.

Well, I mean native speakers. If you were brought up bilingually with
Japanese and English equally emphasized, which would you think is more
beautiful?

> The only nice thing about Japanese is the regular verb conjugation
> and the lack of noun conjugation (I can't remember what it's called
> with nouns).

Spanish tends to be much more regular, but at the cost of having a
bunch more verb forms. Still not as nice as Lojban.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

2008/9/29 Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>:

> I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe a
> cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as much
> as a cumbersome grammar does. And other eastern countries have
> reformed orthographies or (maybe?) haven't used ideographs in
> centuries or more. But I don't really know much about those.

I am a native Korean speaker, and can do some Japanese.

Japanese orthography sucks. No question. In general ideographs suck.
Thankfully, Korean orthography does not suck. It is a beautiful work.

But if you are asking about languages rather than orthographies, well,
I found all languages I learned to be very idiosyncratic, although grammatical
genders especially suck.

--
Seo Sanghyeon

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you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 01:00:04PM +0900, Seo Sanghyeon wrote:

> 2008/9/29 Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>:

> > I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but
> > maybe a cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded
> > person as much as a cumbersome grammar does. And other eastern
> > countries have reformed orthographies or (maybe?) haven't used
> > ideographs in centuries or more. But I don't really know much
> > about those.
>
> I am a native Korean speaker, and can do some Japanese.
>
> Japanese orthography sucks. No question. In general ideographs
> suck. Thankfully, Korean orthography does not suck. It is a
> beautiful work.

It's also a constructed orthography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul

-Robin

--
Lojban Reason #17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo
Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 6:00 AM, Seo Sanghyeon <sanxiyn@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/9/29 Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>:

>> I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe a
>> cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as much
>> as a cumbersome grammar does. And other eastern countries have
>> reformed orthographies or (maybe?) haven't used ideographs in
>> centuries or more. But I don't really know much about those.
>
> I am a native Korean speaker, and can do some Japanese.
>
> Japanese orthography sucks. No question. In general ideographs suck.
> Thankfully, Korean orthography does not suck. It is a beautiful work.

I'm a native Japanese and French speaker. I must point out that
Japanese orthography has its own advantages. For one thing, it allows
you scanning/skimming texts pretty faster, as you instantly
distinguish ideographs (ideas) from syllabaries (structures).
Katakana, a syllabary, also happens to be as semantically rich as
Kanji, as it mostly represents loan words, concepts, rather than
syntactic elements. An example:

僕は サラダを 食べた (Boku-wa Salada-o Ta-beta)
mi pu citka lo salta

"僕", "サラダ", and "食" all represent the sentence's basic conceptual
items, "mi", "salta", and "citka". For native Japanese speakers, the
distinction of such semantic components from syntactic components is
mostly intuitive (after all, every Kanji is basically pictorial and
intuitional). It can be as instantaneous as making them out in:

僕 pu 食 lo サラダ .imu'ibo le 母 cu 強 望 la'e di'u
（僕は サラダを 食べた。なぜなら 母さんが それを 強く望んだから。）

as opposed to:

mi pu citka lo salta .imu'ibo le mamta cu bapli djica la'e di'u
（ぼくは さらだを たべた。なぜなら かあさんが それを つよく のぞんだから。）

It can significantly save you time going through "less important"
letters/words for the purpose of understanding the text's gist.
(Interestingly, these examples show how Kanji quite corresponds to
brivla and Hiragana to ma'ovla. Katakana should then correspond to
either fu'ivla or cmevla.)

In purely alphabetical languages, you have to first analyse the
sequence of the uniform letters in order to *see* the semantic
landscape of a text. In Japanese orthography, such an analytic process
is in most cases unnecessary.

I wouldn't say the orthography is flawless, but neither would I say it sucks.

As for Korean (alphabetical) orthography, I like it. I find it
beautiful and easy to learn. But it's not without a certain systemic
problem, especially after it did away with the Chinese characters or
Hanja (한자). It has left numerous homonyms unable to distinguish apart
without contextual reference. The Vietnamese orthography, no longer
using the Chinese characters too, seems more successful than Hangul,
probably because the language's own complex phonology has greatly if
not perfectly prevented homonym. There are little controversy among
Vietnamese over continuing with their current orthography, whereas in
(South) Korea a pro-Hanja movement is noticeable. On the other hand,
some Koreans seem to think too highly of Hangul to the point where
they argue (as on the "world's largest" Japanese internet forum,
2channel) that it can represent "any" sound of "any" language, which
simply isn't true (for instance, it doesn't have a letter for f
apart from the substitutive /ㅍ/, and /ㄹ/ doesn't distinguish between
l and r).

mu'o mi'e tijlan