"Jump, Apple". "How high, ancarda?"
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Eh. Humans are hard-wired to form small groups of attachment and to dehumanize anyone not in their group, to some extent.
Well, sure. But the main point of coming up with language is to communicate with others. That it can be used to exclude people is accidental, not essential. Which isn't, of course, to say that a particular language wasn't made for that purpose, or that the choice of a particular language can't be for that.
Thinking that exclusion is the point of language strikes me as hipster cynicism.
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Eh, that's fair, you can quibble over the "main point". But on some level, communication is a means to reinforce social bonds (as well as transfer information), and reinforcing the social bonds stabilizes the in-group/out-group dynamic, so it's pretty central.
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Many modern languages can be traced down to a fairly small number of root languages.
Language is part of cultural boundaries. "We speak this language here, we like this kind of entertainment, we believe in this model of relationships, and worship this god, hold this belief system."
But before you say there are also dead languages ... Sure they fold back in and the boundaries shift as the group identities shift.
See what happened to Breton, really. With the language most of the cultural identity died too.
Language primarily serves the function of communicating to those like you around you. If language is a accessible to those you don't interact with is not a concern of linguistic evolution.
There is no malicious exclusionist thought process behind it... just generations of "doing it this way here." building up.
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hipster cynicism
I was a cynic before it was cool.
Yami and Royal Poet have a point. I've long suspected that certain groups (cough SJW1 cough) use language for exactly the purpose Yami and Royal Poet mentioned.
1 Other groups also do this. I just mention SJWs in this context because I like criticizing them.
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Yami and Royal Poet have a point. I've long suspected that certain groups (cough SJW1 cough) use language for exactly the purpose Yami and Royal Poet mentioned.
Like I said, it's not that it doesn't happen. But it's not the reason language exists, is my point.
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But the main point of coming up with language is to communicate with others.
Language exists because of evolutionary pressure. The most important advance ever made by humans was the ability for one generation to pass on knowledge to the next, and speech is the technology that enables this. Our throat layout would have made us die out eons ago if it wasn't the critical part of making the wide variety of sounds that are necessary to have a rich language.
tldr; Yes, you are right.
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I've already disqualified everybody on this site because you've been scheming and cheating and being pedantic dickweeds about what I typed when it was obvious what I meant. So it doesn't matter what you do at this point.
I doubt the automatic answer I got back cares if I was from here.
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Eh, I wouldn't call it that much, but in this case, nothing PHP-GTK ever made the internets.
A professor at the university I studied created a framework based on php gtk, and wrote some books about it.
Only time I ever heard of it, but he seems to like it.
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Why are you using an alt account for this post, @ben_lubar? Are you trying to convince us that there is more than one lojban speaker?
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Ben's "alt account" uses a Mac and doesn't play Dwarf Fortress?
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Ben's "alt account" uses a Mac and doesn't play Dwarf Fortress?
@ben_lubot runs on Linux and doesn't play Dwarf Fortress. Because that's df-ai's job.
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It's not running right now, but if it was it would.
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I'll just leave this here:
"What language was that, Latin?”
“No, these are the Middle Ages. There are people you’ve met here who actually speak Latin. All of our spells are in Esperanto. It’s a universal language that was invented early in the twentieth century to foster international peace and understanding. It’s perfect for our purposes because there are many resources to translate things into it and absolutely nobody speaks it.”
“Nobody in this time.”
“Nobody in any time. Seriously, William Shatner, and that’s about it.
"The"?
That's an article, not an adjective. I know they start with the same letter, but really, Ben, ...@antiquarian said:I just mention SJWs in this context because I like criticizing them.
Can we please not fucking do this? It's hard enough to have actual discussions about actual problems that actual activists care about. Taking a dump over all that to rile up the extremists, drowning out all hope of meaningful conversation with the moderates, just for the lulz, is not only pointless, it makes conversation at all not worth having.
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If I'd meant an article, you silly boy, I'd've used that word.
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However,
gadriarecmavo, notbrivla
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The main problem with Lojban is that it's an artificial language based on the predicate logic whose developers know so little about logic that they believe it s a good idea to build a language on the top of the classical predicate logic. They don't notice the problem because they don't actually try to use the language for logical reasoning but instead treat it as an ordinary everyday non-logical language with a slightly funny syntax and a weird insistence that no word may mean two different things.
There are many reasons why predicate logic is an awful base for human communication and the most fundamental of them is that it's an extremely fragile system. Make the tiniest mistake, and you are left with an inconsistent knowledge base. This is bad because every sentence is a logical consequence of an inconsistent set of sentences. But, just to make it clear, this is not a practical problem for Lojban-speakers because they aren't doing any logic with it.
But suppose that they did and actually were veeery careful about their formulations. Then they would find out about the second problem that they now ignore: belief revision. Namely, the lack of it. The predicate logic doesn't have any built-in mechanism for removing stuff from the knowledge base. If you conclude that something is true, it will stay true forever and ever. If you then want to conclude that it really is false, you can do it, but then it is both true and false and you are back to the inconsistent situation where you will believe everything. If the lojbanites want to someday use the language for logic (they don't), they will have to define how belief revision works for them and that's a bitch to do with classical logic. The result will be a system that is too difficult to use in practice so everyone ignores it and continues using Lojban in the non-logical fashion, just like they use normal languages.
One of the stated goals of Lojban is to provide an unambiguous language, but they tackle ambiguity only on superficial syntactic level (and failed even in that, the Lojban tutorial that I read had an example of Lojban sentence that had two parse trees). They leave out the much more important semantic ambiguity. If I get misunderstood because of my syntax, I can always state it differently to get understood. If the words itself mean different things to the listener, simple rewording won't help.
The Lojban folks happily allow people introduce words that don't have an unambiguos definition. Last that I looked at the language they had the word for 'fast' there, and that word is damned ambiguous. There was also a suggestion to use 'fast according to the standard X' instead, but that doesn't help the situation the slightest because the original 100% ambiguous 'fast' is still there and if someone actually tried to define the standards 'X', they would quickly find out that they can't do those in a way that is both unambiguous and useful. Well, they would find that if they could do logic. But they can't so they they probably wouldn't notice any problems at all.
I've read one document that claimed to define formal semantics for Lojban. It was the standard semantics of classical predicate logic without any information at all on how it should (or even could) be applied to human communication. No thought was given to the problem of ensuring that the speakers agree with each other about the definitions of the words. It's just assumed that the speakers will know what the words mean, just like when using ordinary non-logical languages.
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the Lojban tutorial that I read had an example of Lojban sentence that had two parse trees
I can't find anything like that in a quick search. Are you sure it wasn't just showing two ways of phrasing the same text, possibly with cmavrse?
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ci'au'u'au'inai means "I am ashamed that I invented a new word for an emotion", which was probably the first thing that the person who invented ci'au'u'au'inai said.
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I'm having a bit of trouble following your logic here, since your example would be true for any language that I did not now well enough to understand all the connotations of a word. "Junk", for example, just means "rubbish", "trash", or "discarded things we keep in the attic because we haven't gotten around to throw it away and we're afraid of doing so because it might come in handy some day". Only if I understand english well enough do I understand that "junk food" refers to a specific type of food.
So I guess I am agreeing with @Maciejasjmj, and you could just as well have picked any language of a non-germanic origin. I hear you can even sing in Polish.
Then again, choices of which language to write new years' resolutions in do not have to be logical.
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Lojban itself does have a lack of vocabulary and, at least for me, forces me to take a slightly different perspective. A bit like rubber duck debugging. Yes, I'm sure I could use any language for this, I just happened to learn Lojban years ago despite trying to learn natural languages (I've tried German for instance, could never pick it up).
The other thing I like is sometimes I can have thoughts in Lojban that I find hard to translate into English. Again I'm sure this isn't unique to Lojban but it makes me think I may not have come across those thoughts as easily if I'm having trouble coming up with the words in the first place.
Ultimately I just find the language fun and at times, genuinely useful for understanding. Can we leave it at that?
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Leaving a debate at "let's just agree to disagree"? Here? On this forum?
YMBNH
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There's a reason I didn't give examples of thoughts I've had in Lojban that I find hard to translate into English; I fully expect days of pedantry, nitpicking and essays and I don't have time for that right now.
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Read up on Saphir-Whorf's linguistic relativity.
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Can we please not fucking do this? It's hard enough to have actual discussions about actual problems that actual activists care about.
Do you really think that is possible? We've tried here. Just read any of the
threads.
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Take any two languages and you'll find things that are easy to phrase in one but kludgy in the other. English isn't that bad at it anyway, compared to, for example, Polish - I personally find English rather fluid and idiomatic, while the same phrases in Polish sound stiff and obtuse.
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phrases in Polish sound stiff and obtuse.
When all your neighbouring countries have -at some time or other- stabbed you in your back, wording becomes very important.
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Polish - I personally find English rather fluid and idiomatic, while the same phrases in Polish sound stiff and obtuse.
It shows in Polish translations from English: Polish versions tend to be around 20% longer. Zbigniew Zieliński, Polish interpreter who specialized in American literature used to complain about it a lot, especially when working with Hemingway's works due to obvious reasons. Still did a great job. With Mellville too.
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When all your neighbouring countries have -at some time or other- stabbed you in your back,
Well, not all. Czechs for example.
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Ben's "alt account" uses a Mac and doesn't play Dwarf Fortress?
I'll take your word for this. Apply occam's razor and you'll see that the simplest explanation for this is that you have dissociative identity disorder. That would require extraordinary evidence for anyone to accept your claim that there is more than one lojban speaker in the known universe.
I won't even try to figure if lojban itself is real, and you're not just posting random character sequences :P
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I knew this would happen. Yes. There's no way I can prove I'm not @ben_lubar. The best I can do is you can ask @Arantor for proof he has met me (we work together). But Arantor has never met Ben and there's no way to prove I'm not also Arantor.
Frankly having to "prove" I exist simply because I speak an unusual language is discrimination.
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An administrator could probably look at your IP address and see that it's different from mine, but as everyone knows, we are all @boomzilla's alt.
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A vpn is still more likely than another logjam speaker.
I suppose I could get a VB GUI to track you down though...
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There is probably a third personality that did that translation for apple. Maybe one of them has an important position there? That would explain them following his requests.
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Did they actually translate anything or just add the option to use the 0% translated language pack?
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If you see in the OS X screenshot it says the language isn't fully supported. They essentially added
jboas a recognized language, which lets iOS and OS X apps provide translations and lets Safari send the appropriate Accept-Language header. The apps bundled from Apple contain no strings, however.As far as I can tell, the most work they did was to translate "Lojban" into many languages. Setting your phone to Russian, for instance, shows a Russian translation of Lojban in the language menu.
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That's all just data mined from the CLDR:
cldr/common/main/fr.xml at latest · unicode-org/cldr
The home of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository - unicode-org/cldr
<language type="jbo">lojban</language>
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Oh cool, I didn't know that existed! That's neat.
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@ancarda and I aren't the same and aren't alts (not even of @boomzilla)
He isn't nearly jaded and cynical enough about the IT industry yet ;)
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Having met both @ancarda and @arantor in person I can confirm they are separate people. One has awesome long hair and the other has pretty eyes. If you encounter them in combination you will experience an err_fucking_too_much_php_overload.
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It shows in Polish translations from English: Polish versions tend to be around 20% longer.
You have similar problems when going in the opposite direction. Translations that don't increase the length of a text (especially of fiction) are really very difficult, precisely because you're not just translating the words but also the cultural context. You can even get the same problem within a language: not everything carries across from the US to the UK or vice versa, and it's not for nothing that we've been accused of being two countries divided by a common language.
Doing translation correctly requires constructing a mental model of the entirety of the semantics of the source text (hard!) then mapping that into the model space of the other culture (hard!) before generating the text in the target language to allow readers to get the model (comparatively easy). I remain impressed by people who are good at doing this sort of thing.
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I still think it can be saved and you still
thinkknow I'm wrong
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Aww thank you! <3 If we're dishing out complements, you have a lovely accent.
Right, we now have 2 people in the ancarda-Is-Not-Ben_Lubar Web of Trust. Won't you pledge to stop the discrimination against the tens of Lojbanists everywhere?
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Wait. Now I'm confused. Is @arantor in fact @ben_lubar?
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Nah, all three of us are different alts of @boomzilla.
