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Lojban

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Re: Lojban

#51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that Lojban is more of a research language than something people actually speak, but I'd be delighted to be wrong. It's beautifully elegant. Did You Know... Lojban's regular enough that there's a yacc grammar for it? http://www.lojban.org/publications/formal-grammars/grammar.3...

And PEG too https://github.com/Ilmen-vodhr/ilmentufa/

So what is the actual class of the language? YACC means LALR(1) and PEG means LL(*), afaik. Can you write a LL(k) or even SLL(k) grammar?

Re: Lojban

#52
post #46
post #12

Boy, I have fond memories of participating in the Lojban Yahoo group back in 2003 when I was 16. I carried around the Cowan book to my classes and loved reading random sections. I was in awe of how elegantly it was designed, and it inspired me to invent my own languages. My only complaint about the language was about the reliance on word order instead of prepositions to determine the relationship between nouns. It ma…

I participated in that group for a while, too. It was fun to learn, and it gave me some ideas that got me going in natural language processing despite that it's not a natural language. The argument structures were one of the big problems I had with it, too: it seemed like someone coming up with predicates just kept tacking on more arguments that were not at all essential to the predicate, in case someone wanted them.…

I went by oskar2379. I did a search and only came across one post from my teenage self, linked below. You can see I was complaining about the predicates back then, too =)

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/jboske/conversations/mes...

Re: Lojban

#53
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe my response wasn't clear enough. I don't believe that the statement "By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently." is useful. I do not think it's useful for most people to learn Linear B. Instead, I think there are more effective ways to 'learn how to think and reason differently' in the same amount of time, if that's one's goal. In addition, the comment about gender…

Actually, I was thinking of Finnish. With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought. Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered any…

Ahh, I see the source of the confusion. Finnish is a Nordic language, but not a Scandinavian language.

If someone wants to appreciate differences in color perception, is it better to learn Scottish Gaelic or read Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" or similar works since 1969? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_i... for the differences in blue and green across many different languages.

This is why I argue that if the goal is to "think and reason differently" then learning a new language should not be high on the list. Instead, learning a new language has a side effect of thinking and reasoning differently, but so do many other topics. I believe there are easier ways achieve that goal than learning a new language.

Your 'key' example is resolved in Swedish with a special term for his/her own X. Compare "Han öppnade dörren med sin nyckel" (He opened the door with his own key) with "Han öppnade dörren med hans nyckel" (He opened the door with some other male's key.)

GEB is also all about recursion. I remember in my own learning how tough it was to understand recursion and induction. I consider that a mode of thought.

There's also the essay in GEB about the difficulties of language translation, such as the street name in Crime and Punishment. He goes into several pages about the different aspects of that translation. I consider that an aspect of the same mode of thought you are talking about. Further, in "Metamagical Themas" he covers aspects of gender neutrality in Chinese. Reading his essays seems much easier than learning Finnish.

I'm not arguing against your conclusion, which is that "Learning _and internalising_ a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit" but against the implication that learning a new way to think is one of the reasons to learn a new language. I think that's poor advice given other methods to learn new ways of thinking.

Further, languages are not equal. The Swedish mode of thought is very similar to English, so you might end up after a couple of years of study with only a few small insights that could have been more easily learned by reading a linguistics textbook.

Re: Lojban

#54
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every little step you learn of a language also improves your global understanding and therefore wasn't wasted. // Global understanding of what? Suppose the language isn't spoken/used by many people and has a different grammar to all other languages. You may never use the language and it's grammatical structure won't help you with any other language that you do use ... so then, what would be the advantage? Wouldn't l…

Because language, to a large decree, determines your mode of thought. By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently. It doesn't matter whether you actually use it to talk to people or not. For example: some African languages don't have temporal tenses --- they don't distinguish between past, present and future. Some Scandinavian languages don't have gender, anywhere. Some langua…

I certainly don't think in language. Easy evidence: I know the idea of what I want to say, but I totally forget the word. Language is just something I have to compile to once the idea is fully formed.

I understand that lots of people actually do think in language, but you shouldn't assume that everyone follows the same mental process.

Re: Lojban

#55
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably depends on your goals. Since you already know the most popular language in the world, it doesn't seem like there's much point in learning either of them just to extend the number of people you can communicate with. For that reason it would make sense to learn Chinese or Spanish. To me the appeal of Lojban is in "expanding your mind" and using different tools for thinking. Also, I've recently read somewhere p…

Actually Mandarin is the most “popular” language in the world, not English. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

Popular? --> Sort by L2 speakers.

Re: Lojban

#56
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every little step you learn of a language also improves your global understanding and therefore wasn't wasted. // Global understanding of what? Suppose the language isn't spoken/used by many people and has a different grammar to all other languages. You may never use the language and it's grammatical structure won't help you with any other language that you do use ... so then, what would be the advantage? Wouldn't l…

Because language, to a large decree, determines your mode of thought. By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently. It doesn't matter whether you actually use it to talk to people or not. For example: some African languages don't have temporal tenses --- they don't distinguish between past, present and future. Some Scandinavian languages don't have gender, anywhere. Some langua…

I certainly don't think in language. Easy evidence: I know the idea of what I want to say, but I totally forget the word. Language is just something I have to compile to once the idea is fully formed.

I understand that lots of people actually do think in language, but you shouldn't assume that everyone follows the same mental process.

Re: Lojban

#57
post #12

Boy, I have fond memories of participating in the Lojban Yahoo group back in 2003 when I was 16. I carried around the Cowan book to my classes and loved reading random sections. I was in awe of how elegantly it was designed, and it inspired me to invent my own languages. My only complaint about the language was about the reliance on word order instead of prepositions to determine the relationship between nouns. It ma…

I remember learning quite a bit of Lojban back in 1989 using a flashcard program on my PC. I even subscribed to Bob LeChevalier's newsletter for a while. I drifted away from it probably because it wasn't solving a problem that I had, cool as it was in theory. It was probably more interesting to construct the language than to use it.

Re: Lojban

#58
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I was thinking of Finnish. With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought. Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered any…

Ahh, I see the source of the confusion. Finnish is a Nordic language, but not a Scandinavian language. If someone wants to appreciate differences in color perception, is it better to learn Scottish Gaelic or read Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" or similar works since 1969? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_i... for the differences in blue and gr…

Re Finnish: fair enough. It's spoken in Scandinavia, hence my use of the word. I know it's a bit weird, language-wise.

Regarding translation, I keep meaning to pick up Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot, which is all about this sort of thing.

Re: Lojban

#59
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe my response wasn't clear enough. I don't believe that the statement "By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently." is useful. I do not think it's useful for most people to learn Linear B. Instead, I think there are more effective ways to 'learn how to think and reason differently' in the same amount of time, if that's one's goal. In addition, the comment about gender…

Actually, I was thinking of Finnish. With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought. Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered any…

>Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish. //

I don't think your conclusion follows. We elicit a sentence that externally shortcuts the designation of who does what by using pronouns where it seems still clear. But that doesn't mean we reason any differently internally about the subjects and objects. With a sentence like:

"The mother gave the sommelier a wave."

Being spoken as:

"She gave him a wave."

It seems quite reasonable to imagine that we perceive in our mind's eye the subject and object in the same way but extract the pertinent information as appropriate. A simpler sentence could be the result of a more complex process.

But then we come across this sort of issue within English too because we come across ambiguous situations "they gave me the other's key". Or perhaps ...

A: "She gave me her key"

B: "Who?"

A: "The girl gave me her key."

B: "Why did the girl have a key?"

A: "No I mean the girl gave me the mother's key."

The reasoning about the people was clearly about a girl and a mother in the first sentence but the expression of that reason wasn't elicited until the final one - I don't think the mental model has changed anywhere is such an exchange. Thus I don't see why there needs be a different internal model being used in your [david-given's] example.

In your red example if someone tells me "he has red hair" red refers to a different thing to "his door is red" - red _hair_ is what we call ginger hair usually. It's not that Gael's think of red differently IMO it's just a limitation of English expression. The expression doesn't reflect the internal model well.

Re: Lojban

#60
The problem with inventing languages is that we don't fully understand natural languages. For example, there is no satisfactory formal semantics for natural languages. Categorical grammar and Montague grammar are some inroads into formal semantics, but they don't get very far. The work of Roger Schank got further in terms of expressiveness, but then fizzled out, probably because it was ad hoc and lacked an underlying mathematical structure. So inventing a language is working in the dark.

There are some natural languages which were in part designed in a top down manner, like Mandarin and Indonesian. But still, on the scale of natural to artificial, these are much closer to natural languages. They were both based on some other natural language(s), borrowing words and grammar from them.

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