Trobrianders

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Trobrianders are the inhabitants of the Trobriand or Kiriwina Islands, an archipelago belonging to Papua New Guinea. Trobrianders speak the Kilivila language, which belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian family of Austronesian languages. In the context of Loglan, discussion of Trobrianders usually references aspects of a worldview said to be implicit in the language of the islanders, as understood by James Cooke Brown based on his reading of the works of anthropologists Bronisław Malinowski and Dorothy D. Lee and his understanding of the use of those works by Willard van Orman Quine in Word and Object (1960). Malinowski's Coral Gardens And Their Magic (1935) and Lee's Conceptual Implications of an Indian Language (1938) are cited in Word and Object, but it's not clear if Malinowski, Lee, or Quine attributed the same features to the Trobrianders and their language as is suggested by Brown.

Mass description

In Loglan 1, in the section entitled Mass Description with lo, JCB wrote:

the languages of some preliterate peoples apparently employ the idea of mass description as the elementary meaning of their basic predicate words. Thus the Trobriand Islanders are reported to place this interpretation on all their nouns; whence the curious world-view arises that what we Indo-Europeans would call a single instance of a thing is, to them, nothing but a part, or reappearance, or manifestation of the same, massive individual thing. Thus every rabbit is just another appearance of Mr. Rabbit; every yam just another manifestation of Mr. Yam; every baby just a part of Mr. Baby all over again

Brown proposes that Loglan's "mass designator" operator, lo (analogous to Lojban's mass descriptor, loi) provides a facility to describe the world in a similar fashion, and that a Trobriander who learned Loglan might prefer to use mass descriptions and lo where a native English speaker would employ "particular descriptions" via le.

Brown traces the origin of mass description in Loglan to his reading of Word and Object and particularly to the "radical translation" thought experiment which establishes the "inscrutability of reference". Brown is interested in the argument that it is impossible to distinguish by means of a stimulus-response experiment, between "general terms" and "singular terms", or between general terms that designate, say, "whole enduring rabbits", and those which name "mere stage, or brief temporal segments, of rabbits", or even "the fusion, in Goodman's sense, of all rabbits: that single though discontinuous portion of the spatiotemporal world that consists of rabbits".

In "Sets and Masses" (Lognet 96/1) Brown suggests that "Quine probably had in mind the Trobriand Islanders" when discussing predicates that assert "the presence of some (specified) mass individual, and so enables claims that are said to be true when and only when some manifestation of that mass individual is present, e.g., when some manifestation of Mr. Rabbit, say a vanishing hindfoot of a particular rabbit, is present." The identification of a tendency towards mass description with the language of the Trobrianders does not seem to be justified by the footnotes to Malinowski or Lee. Nor does a similar feature stand out when perusing Gunter Senft's 1952 grammar, Kilivila: The Language of the Trobriand Islanders. John Cowan has noted that Kilivila's use of classifiers is not distinctive in its treatment of mass nouns from relatively less exotic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Burmese.