Hallo conlangers!

On 04.10.2015 16:04, R A Brown wrote:

> On 04/10/2015 10:46, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> I think that mentioning conlangs for testing SWH is
>> useless
>
> Hardly useless in that for one conlang, at least, this was
> primary aim.  In the very first sentence of his article in
> SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN June, 1960 (Volume 202 Number 6, page 53
> - 63), JCB wrote quite explicitly:
> {quote}
> This logical language is now being synthesized on modern
> linguistic principles, largely to examine the hypothesis
> that the world view of the members of a culture is
> determined by the structure of their language.
> {/quote}

So, testing the SWH was the *primary* goal of Loglan, there is no point 
denying that!

> It is generally agreed that loglangs are a subset of
> engelangs, which are conlangs engineered to meet certain
> defined criteria.  Unlike other sorts of conlangs, engelangs
> can be evaluated with some degree of objectiveness: Has the
> language met its objectives?

Right - any engelang can be meaningfully tested against whether it has 
met its objectives or not.  Of course, even an engelang that fails its 
stated design goals can be a successful conlang for some other reason, 
but the design goals set by the author himself remain the primary 
touchstone.

> If it is claimed that a language is designed to test the SWH
> then it is neither I nor anyone else here that is mentioning
> it so much as the inventor him-/her-self.  Nor IIRC was
> Loglan the only conlang of the late 1960s early 1970s that
> had this as one of its aims.

There are many languages that were designed to allow for faster, more 
efficient, more logical, more whatever thought, which in all cases, even 
if not explicitly stated, amounts to either testing or applying the 
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  After all, if the SWH was false, no such 
effects could be achieved by designing a language.

> How, then, can one evaluate the success or otherwise of the
> language in meeting this criterion without mentioning SWH?

Any evaluation of the "success" of Loglan must at least address the 
question of testing the SWH.  There are people who try to evaluate 
Loglan or Lojban by counting practitioners as if it was an auxlang, but 
that wasn't the language's primary design goal.  The primary design goal 
was testing the SWH, and as long the SWH hasn't been tested, the project 
must be considered inconclusive.

Who was it who first suggested using Loglan or Lojban as an IAL?  I know 
that some people pursue that, but JCB at least makes no mention of such 
an application in his 1960 Scientific American article, and I think 
neither the Loglan Institute nor the Logical Language Group did so.

>> since Loglan was never a language one could fluently
>> speak,
>
> Isn't it?  I don't know. Are there any Loglanists on the
> list who can enlighten us?  Are there _no_ members of the
> Loglan Institute who can/could speak it?
>
> If Gleki is right, it suggests to me what I have suspected
> from time to time, i.e. that humans would not be able to
> converse in _true_ loglangs.  But is Gleki right?

I don't know.  I never seriously tried to learn any loglang, "true" or 
not.  But I tried to understand the grammar of Lojban, and I failed.  I 
never met this amount of difficulty in any natlang grammar I studied, no 
matter how "exotic".

>> Lojban didn't have any plans on testing it.
>
> This is not true.  If you read the second sentence of
> Chapter 1 of "The Complete Lojban Language" by John Woldemar
> Cowan you find:
> {quote}
> Previous versions of the language were called “Loglan” by
> Dr. James Cooke Brown, who founded the Loglan Project and
> started the development of the language in 1955. The goals
> for the language were first described in the open literature
> in the article “Loglan”, published in Scientific American,
> June, 1960.
> {/quote}
>
> There is a quite explicit reference there to JCB's article
> of 1960 in which it is explicitly stated that testing the
> SWH is an aim of the language.  It is true that over the
> past half century other aims have dominated and this one has
> sort of disappeared; but to say that Lojban did not ever
> have this in mind is not true.

Indeed not.  Lojban is "a realization of Loglan", if I am not mistaken, 
and that means that the design goals of Loglan apply to Lojban as well.  
As I said before, the raison d'être of Lojban as a language distinct 
from JCB's Loglan was to evade JCB's copyright claims and create a 
language that worked just like JCB's Loglan but in the public domain.

> When, many years ago, I asked John Woldemar Cowan (who was
> for some time an active member of this list) whether Lojban
> had produced any results one way or the other regarding the
> SWH, he did not reply that this was not one of Lojban's
> aims; he merely said there there was nothing publishable yet.
>
> OK - I will accept that Lojban has quietly dropped this from
> its agenda.  That it is actually spoken and used is IMO
> because Lojban ceased to be a pure loglang and has become a
> loglang-natlangoid hybrid (I don't go so far as And in
> saying Lojban is no longer a loglang - but I see where he is
> coming from).

This may be the case.  Just because a conlang was made for a specific 
purpose originally, doesn't mean that it doesn't get to be put to other 
uses.  It is not illegitimate to propose Lojban as an IAL, for instance 
(though I personally think that it is utterly inappropriate to that 
application).  But criticizing a conlang of failing at a purpose it 
wasn't made for is besides the point.  So Loglan/Lojban may be a lousy 
auxlang.  Who cares, it was not made for that!  It was made for testing 
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and if it hasn't been used for that yet, the 
project must be considered inconclusive!

>> And in general Guugu Yimitthir is a better testbed, more
>> thoroughly studied and definitely not artificial in any
>> way.
>
> Better tested, in that it is the result of the natural
> language evolution of a human community.  Whether it has
> been more studied than Lojban is, I would have thought, a
> moot question. But as several of us have stated, in our
> opinions it throws no light on the validity of the SWH.

I concur with that.

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