menli saske papri

Lojban particle around the world

ma = what?

ma has generally the same meaning as in Lojban in Khoisan, Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, and Dené–Caucasian languages. In Amerind languages, the word mana has the same meaning.

Wishes, hopes and optative mood

The optative mood is a grammatical construct that indicates a wish or hope.

In Lojban, the interjections da'i for hypothetical situations, au for desire, and .a'o for hope can give us optative meaning.

English has no explicit optative, but there are various constructions with optative meaning. Let's look at them with their translation to Lojban:

a'o do ba ze'u jmive May you have a long life! (hope!) you will for a long time live [literally]

Another uses the phrase "if only" with a verb in the past or past subjunctive, e.g.

au do ca ricfu If only I were rich! (desire!) you now are rich [literally]

Different languages have specific constructs to express optative mood.

In Ancient Greek, the optative expressing a wish is on its own or preceded by the particle εἴθε (eithe):

au do renro Εἴθε βάλλοις = Eíthe bállois = If only you would throw.

The optative expressing potentiality is always accompanied by the untranslatable particle ἄν in an independent clause and is on its own in a dependent clause:

mi gleki da'i fau lo nu do litru Χαίροιμι ἂν, εἰ πορεύοισθε (Chaíroimi àn, ei poreúoisthe) "I would be glad if you could travel.

General Semantics and The 12 Steps To Semantic Modeling

Semantics is an important part of constructing languages. However, people usually use the semantics from their native languages. Here is a way to understand semantics better, and it gives us a way to build semantic models rather than using the semantics from our native languages.

For those of you familiar with Alfred Korzybski, this is a way of abstracting reality. Alfred Korzybski talked about "consciousness of abstraction" with his work in general semantics. With practice of semantics, we can develop our minds to become conscious of the semantics behind the words, which is the "consciousness of abstraction" that Alfred Korzybski talked about. There are not too many people that know how to do this in the world, so practicing and studying this will give you a great mental power that few people have. A student of Alfred Korzybski constructed a language called E-prime to deal with the ambiguity and semantic problems of the verb "to be".

1. Identification. This is how we identify the phenomena, which can include the word, some identifier, a symbol, our observations, and/or sensory/perception pattern recognition. In most cases, this would be the word or symbol in our native languages.

2. Measurables. Many call these properties or attributes in semantics and philosophy/ontology, but that is often an error. The word 'color' represents a measurable from light that reflected off an object, which means the light is not a property of the object itself; the light frequency, which is the color, is reflected and what is measured when we use the word 'color'. In simple terms, we can just list the properties and attributes for our semantic models in this step.

3. Inheritance. This refers to the generality/specificity relationships in semantics. For example, the semantics of the words "man" and "woman" are specific classes of the more general semantic class that we use with the word "human". In Spanish, we use the words "hombre", "mujer", and "humana", but the semantics underneath those words are equivalent to the semantics of "man", "woman", and "human". That means the semantics underneath the words in both languages have the same generality/specificity relationship. For another example, we have the semantics of "car" and "truck" being more specific classes of "vehicles". We can call them a subclass of vehicle.

4. Composition. Here we list the components in the phenomena for the semantic model that we are building. If we are building a semantic model of a rose, we would need to know its components such as the leaves, thorns, stem, and petals. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Shakespeare

5. Arrangement. The shape or form common to the phenomena we are modeling. This is usually more of the surface measures than the depth we find in composition. For example, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders each refer to different forms of columns that come from ancient Greece.

6. Creation. This step is about including and modeling, to some extent, the cause of creation. For example, the semantic model of the word "forgery" is connected to a false cause of creation. In other contexts, it's about modeling the process of creation, which we can do with the question "what causes the phenomena to come into existence?".

7. Causality. With this step, you can refer to Aristotle's Four Causes if you need help. In the preceding steps, we addressed some of those causes already. We can look at what causes it to behave the way it does. What causes it to start, stop, change, and others. We can look at what cause it was created for, its intent or purpose. Causality is a large area of study since it is connected to everything. Additionally, we can use it to validate truth. If you are interested in going in-depth on causality, then let me know.

8. Spaces (environments, scopes, situations, events). Phenomena exist in various environments or situations (spaces). Notice that some words change meaning (change semantics) based on the context. That context is a situation which is a chunk or slice of space in space-time. For each phenomenon that we make words for, we have to look at the scope in which they operate. That scope, that space, may be bounded. Different types of fish are bound by water, oceans, rivers, and other geographical locations. So for this step, we list the common environments, situations, scopes, or events for the phenomena of our semantic models.

9. Relationships. Organisms have relationships to other organisms, objects are related to other objects by distance in an environment, and some objects are related by how they are touching one another, adjacency. There are many other classes of relationships between objects in environments. You will find that most prepositions have a semantic model of a relationship. Try it! Go through a list of prepositions and see how the preposition refers to a relationship between other items.

10. Change. Transitions, states, life-cycle, and various other changes common to the phenomena being modeled. Be careful not to model the changes of the components in this semantic model. For each component, you have another semantic model with the change to that component kept in that component's semantic model.

11. Actions. We can enumerate actions initiated by the phenomena or coactions which are actions in which the phenomena is used, and we can model them to some extent. In this step too, be careful not to list the actions or coactions of each component. For example, a human can perform the action of shaking one's hand, which is an action done by the whole human. Moving a finger is an action connected to a component of a human, a finger amongst other parts. Keeping actions of components with the component's own semantic model will give your semantic models clarity by connecting actions to their proper scope.

12. Complexity. This is an interesting and, sometimes, difficult step. In the previous step, we discussed actions. Notice the following words: operation, function, action, reaction, interaction, and process. Each word is often used with semantics that are equivalent other than a change in complexity. We usually use the word "operation" when it is simple (few steps), and we use the word "process" when it is more complex and has many steps involved. In other words, the difference in the usual semantics of the words in that list goes on a level starting from the simple "operation" and increasing in complexity to the semantic of "process".

Scalability and backward compatibility of languages

In what ways can any given language be better or worse than any other? 1. Scalability. (Literally, scalability, modularity, the possibility of modular expansion. (Hereinafter - SCA))

2. Backward compatibility. (Hereinafter - BWC)

Scalability means that new constructs of a language such as new syntax, lexicon, affixes must be easily addable to the language if they become required by new demands imposed by the current situation.

If a language is too stiff, scalability is low. With high scalability, the language can also absorb features of other languages.

Backward compatibility means that new constructs of a language should not annul or conflict with the old rules.

Colors in different languages

Most ancient languages didn't have words describing spectral colors. This is why Homer describes iron, fleece of lambs, and sea as all having the color of wine. This is nothing strange here since all of those objects might have had the same hue or texture or other properties similar to which wine has.

Only since the 19th century has mankind (primarily in Europe and USA) started to develop a color system based on spectrum (or colors of rainbow) in their languages.

Many languages had no words for "green" and "blue". Instead, both of them were described using the same word:

• in Thai "khiaw" means "green" or the color of the sky or the sea
• in Korean "purueda"
• in Chinese "qīng"
• in Japanese "ao" means both "green" and "blue". In the 20th century in Japan, the word "midori" denoting a greenish shade of "ao" became more popular due to the influence from Western civilization.

Prototyping:

In Urdu, the word for vegetable "sabzi" is synonymous with "green"; in English, we use the term "greenery".

The concept of redness, that vivid region of the visual spectrum that we associate with fire, strawberries, blood, or ketchup, is something that most cultures share.

In ancient languages: First, languages adopted words for lightness, the words for black and white, then for red, then for green and yellow, then for blue.

To the Dani people who live in the highlands of New Guinea, objects come in just two shades: "mili" is for the cooler shades, from blues and greens to black, and "mola" is for the lighter shades, like reds, yellows, and white.

The Pirahã tribe of the Amazon doesn't have any specialized color words at all; they use prototyping instead.

SWH:

The linguistic distinction between blue and green may heighten the perceived difference between them.

In 2006, a study led by Aubrey Gilbert made a rather surprising discovery. Imagine that you're a subject in their experiment. You're asked to stare at the cross in the middle of the screen. A circle of colored tiles appears. One of the tiles is different from the others. Sometimes it will be on the left, and other times on the right. Your task is to spot whether the odd-color-out is on the left or on the right. Keep your eyes on the cross.

Well, sometimes you'll also get a picture that looks like this.

See the difference? In one case, English speakers have different words for the two colors, blue and green. So there's a concept that builds a wall between them. But in other cases like above, the two colors are conceptually the same.

If you have a word to distinguish two colors, that makes you better at telling them apart. It takes less time to identify that odd blue square compared to the odd green one. This makes sense to anyone who's ever tried looking for a tennis ball in the grass. It's not that hard, but I'd rather the ball be blue. In one case, you are jumping categories (blue versus green), and in the other, staying within a category (green versus green). This usually works only for the right part of your visual field, however, since word language is usually encoded in the left part of our brains which operates the right part of visual field.

For Korean: To the left of the dotted line is yeondu, and to the right chorok. Is it still as easy to spot the odd square in the circle?

We rely on our experience, rather than recognize the color outright.

More reading: Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass.

Free word order

Some languages like English have a more strict word order. First, you put a subject, then a verb, then an object:

I saw a big dog yesterday.

However, in some languages like Russian, words are always marked for their role in a sentence, so you can literally say:

Большую вчера увидел я собаку. Big yesterday saw I dog. [literally]

Chinese is similar to English in that it has a strict word order; however, the helping verb 把 (bǎ) being placed in front of the object of a sentence allows for the object of the sentence to be placed before the verb:

他把刀放在桌子上 (tā bǎ dāo fàng zài zhuōzi shàng) He put the knife on the table. He bǎ knife put at table top [literally]

In Lojban, we have the particles of FA series that can change from strict word order to free word order, thus allowing for greater flexibility in complex sentence constructions, for greater expressivity when packing information, and for following the advantages of different languages.

Friends of both genders in Spanish

In Spanish, AMIGOS means 'male friends', AMIGAS means 'female friends'.

But how to say 'friends' in general? Earlier, 'amigos' was used for that. However, recently a new style has appeared. In e-mail conversations, AMIG@S is used when addressing friends of both genders.

Linguistic relativity. A brief explanation

In 1940, Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like "stone") and actions (like "fall"). For decades, Whorf's theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims:

• that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein's concept of time as a fourth dimension
• that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew
• if a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time

However, when you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, "Are you coming tomorrow?" do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away?

Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else's misfortune?

The renowned linguist Roman Jakobson said: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Suppose I say to you in English that "I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor." You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it's none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn't have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers, and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English requires you to specify certain types of information that can be left to context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s gender, but I do have to provide some information about the timing of the event: I must decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining, and so on. Chinese, in contrast, does not require its speakers to specify the exact time of an action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present, or future actions. Again, this does not mean that Chinese speakers are unable to understand the concept of time; rather, they are not compelled to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely requires you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to specific details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not need to consider constantly.

Languages like Spanish, French, German, and Russian not only require you to consider the gender of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a masculine or feminine gender to a wide range of inanimate objects, often quite arbitrarily. For example, what is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (*la barbe*)? Why is Russian water considered feminine, and why does it become masculine once you dip a tea bag into it? When I speak English, I might say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” remains feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and becomes neuter only when reaching the tip of the tongue.

For instance, a German bridge is feminine (*die Brücke*), but *el puente* is masculine in Spanish; the same applies to clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world, and love. Conversely, an apple is masculine in German but feminine in Spanish, as are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain, and garbage. When speakers were asked to rate various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks, and violins to have more “manly properties,” like strength, while Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are masculine in German but feminine in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice. However, Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits onto objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

To speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at every moment of your waking life. You need to have a mental compass that operates all the time, day and night, without breaks, since otherwise, you would not be able to convey even the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions—whether they are in thick forests or on an open plain, indoors or outdoors, or even in caves—they have a precise sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west, and east are, just as people with perfect pitch can identify each note without calculating intervals. There are numerous stories about what might seem to us like incredible feats of orientation, but for speakers of geographic languages, they are just routine. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation in the correct geographic directions.

How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from a young age to pay attention to clues from the physical environment (such as the position of the sun and the direction of the wind) every second of their lives and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. Everyday communication in a geographic language provides intense training in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as one word in ten in a typical Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west,” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness of geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by ages 7 or 8. With such early and intense training, the habit soon becomes second nature—effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north was, they couldn’t explain it any more than you could explain how you know where “behind” is.

But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, as the sense of orientation must extend further in time than just the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how, in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was more concerned about the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout with cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east, they saw a giant shark swimming north, and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one compelling conclusion is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk, and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different because everything is reversed north-to-south. In his room, the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that was in the west in his room is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.

It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation—whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or foster a less egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of our world and it would never occur to us that pointing at our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

For example, English tends to describe events in terms of agents performing actions. English speakers often say things like "John broke the vase," even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese are more likely to say "the vase broke" or "the vase was broken." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, remember events as eyewitnesses, and assign blame or punishment.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish, and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs, and spilling drinks, either intentionally or accidentally. Later, they were given a surprise memory test: for each event, could they remember who did it? Fausey discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as English speakers did. However, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when the agent would not typically be mentioned in Spanish or Japanese, they did not encode or remember the agent as well.

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (a nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except for the last sentence, where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. People who read "ripped the costume" not only blamed Justin Timberlake more but also imposed 53% higher fines.

Beyond space, time, and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Pirahã, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language lacks number words and instead uses terms like "few" and "many," are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: roses called by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.

(source, source)