Re: LUNATIC again

>Logical Language Group wrote:
>
>> And as I have admitted, for me, Lojban is still an elaborate code in that I
>> translate everything from English, though the translation may be approximate
>> enough that most people would not call it "code".
>
>Maybe that helps differentiate "code" from "language".
>A language is a code that *can* be thought in.
I don't think so.  If it is encoded English, then I might still be able to
think in it, but I am just thinking Englishly with different words.  People
who use heavily slangy dialects are in effect doing something like this.

Given Lojban's unusual grammar though, I don't think that it can be a code
for any natural language, even if no one yet thinks in it (and I have no
idea whether anyuone does or not - the people more skilled in learning
languages may have long passed that stage).  It is simply too hard to recast
English vocabulary in Lojban form to say that one merely manipulates or
transforms the English.  There is indeed a translation process there.

Indeed I think the main reason I have not yet managed to "think" in either
Lojban or Russian is that my vocabulary is too small in each language.
I am used to thinking in English, where I have maybe 100K words at my
disposal.  I estimate that my Russian and Lojban vocabularies are between
2K and 4K, depending on how you count and what level of mastery is the threshold
to call a word "known".  And i simply do not think using that few words, so
I am forced to use English words and translate them, then reformulate those
translated words into Lojban predicates using patterns that I am pretty
instinctive at.  In Russian, I can't coin the words on the fly, and must use
a dictionary which is even slower, or paraphrase.  And I cannot manage to
paraphrase with resort to thinking in English about similarities or differences
between English concepts and teh Russian words for them.

I think people who learn languages to fluency more easily than I am somehow
willing or able to confine their thinking to that portion of life that they
have vocabulary for. I cannot do this.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
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