Lojban In General

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 23:51, Colin Wright <
colin.wright@denbridgemarine.com> wrote:

> I've lost your point. Yes, you can put a definition in something
> other than a "dictionary". I simply pointed out that I didn't
> mention dictionaries, you did.

My point is that all definitions are essentially the same as dictionary
definitions (which is why I added that word), and that the word's usage
comes first and the definition afterwards, and even the most deftailed
definition captures only a pale shadow of the word's usage.

> Well, as I said, I'm not an expert.

I am hardly an expert either.

> The thesis I read seems to
> suggest pretty clearly that there are coordinates who got their
> ability through what Krashen calls learning. I won't argue with
> evidence. I have none to present, and to some extent don't really
> care. I'm merely passing on what I found. If you have evidence
> that no coordinates ever gain their ability through what Krashen
> calls learning, then I find that interesting.
>

I will have to look at it more closely. That is what I recall from the last
time I read Krashen.

Just because it isn't required by the current evidence does not
> suggest it isn't true. I believe this to be a common misuse of
> Occam's razor. That's a philosophical point, though, almost an
> article of faith, rather than science.

In some sense, you're right. But in the absence of evidence that needs a
certain hypothesis to be explained, there is not much point in entertaining
the hypothesis.

> The formal evidence I've
> seen is consistent with SWH, and my personal experience in these
> things persuades me to believe a form of the SWH, and I haven't
> seen any convincing evidence contradicting it, so I will continue
> for now to make predictions with it. So far my predictions have
> proven to be correct.

I guess that this makes me realize that my basic problem with SWH is that it
is essentially impossible to learn a language without also learning the
culture that typically uses it (the well known problem of separating the
two), and I also strongly suspect that if there do exist such things as SWH
effects, it is impossible with our current state of linguistic and cognitive
knowledge to deliberately engineer such effects. If there were to develop
from the current nascent Lojban community a speech community whose primary
spoken language is Lojban, any SWH effects that that community's language
would exhibit would be nearly identical to the SWH effects displayed by
English.

I suspect that if SWH effects exist, they are related to the typical
categories and metaphors, etc, that speakers use (a woefully inadequate
half-sentence way of describing it), and not to much that you will find
described in a complete grammar, but at that point it's not clear how much
these effects are "language" and how much they are "culture". I believe, for
example, that almost all "SWH" effects that might exist could be displayed
just as well if the culture in question were to dictionaries, but would
still use the new language in a subtly different way.

--
Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>
Timendi causa est nescire.