Maxim Three: Loglan is culturally
neutral.
In the original context of testing the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, this meant that Loglan was a language with a
syntax totally different from any other language, so so not
projecting any other language's metaphysics and accompanying culture.
As noted earlier, Loglan is, in fact, an SAE language, committed (if
SWH were true) to the familiar metaphysics and culture of Northern
Occident. Even if the superficial appearance of FOPL, the underlying
source of Loglans, were convincingly different from other languages,
the language which emerges from the transformations to make it
“speakable” is clearly a familiar sort.
So, even though this root problem went
unnoticed, the notion of cultural neutrality shifted from the
syntactic in the broad sense to a more narrow sense and even to
vocabulary. The basic idea became that every culture should have
equal (or at least proportional) access to Loglan. This began with
the decision to construct physical forms of the basic predicates of
the language should be derived from the corresponding terms (as near
as might be) in the major languages of the world according to a
procedure which allots contributions from the various languages
according to their population of users. This has been done three
times, with a changing list of languages and proportions. It has
never been tested that this principle of word forms actually helps
people, even those who speak languages which are heavily represented
in the lists, to learn the vocabulary (anecdotal evidence suggests
that the helpful cases are pretty much balanced off by the misleading
ones). Since the meaning of the predicates are usually very
different from (though related to) the words in the base languages,
the procedure ends up being neutral in the sense that users of all
languages, however hard learning the vocabulary is, are equally
unfamiliar with the meanings of the word learned.
But “equally unfamiliar” was not
the cultural neutrality eventually sought (though, of course, the one
the original purpose aimed for). Loglans ended opting for the
Anglican formula, “All may, none must” (maybe skipping the “some
should”). That is, features of languages of the world would
generally not be obligatory in Loglans, but whatever a language had
would be available in Loglans and roughly as easy to do as
alternatives – except skipping the whole thing. The list of such
items that are, or were at one time, in Loglans reads like a Fun
Facts list about languages. Loglans have optional tenses, of course,
but also optional aspects and moods and modes and other things that
seem related. All of these are expressed in very similar ways, the
one about as easy as the other, and can even be combined for new
possibilities. (Loglans do not, curiously, have the tense system
which appears to hold at least partially in all tense languages, but
rather have a more inclusive system, from Logic, which covers the
natural system somewhat misleadingly. The aspect includes all that
occur in any system, which is more than any one natural language
has.)
The same goes for most other features
that one tends to hear about some language. Loglans have no
singular/plural distinction but can mark the notions with equal ease
(also dual, trial, ….). Loglans have no gender distinctions, but
can mark masculine, feminine, neuter, and probably just about any
other such category with nearly equal ease (though not as easily as
tense or even plurality). Loglans do not do much marking of
relations of terms in a sentence (case or adpositions, typically, in
natural languages) because most of the common ones are inherent in
the meaning of the predicate with regard to given places, but it has
prepositions available to display those relations and many more
beside and means to create even more if need be (though slightly less
efficient than the ones already in the vast vocabulary). Loglans do
not have honorifics or dismissives as a rule, but the means are there
to use them, scarcely more difficult than in their native languages.
Loglans have ana rray of inclusive and exclusive first and second
person pronouns, but require only the one form of each, ambiguous
even to singular and plural. iIt is even possible, though not easy,
to produce a process sentence or a mass language one, thus coming
back to the original idea. And, of course, Loglans' vocabulary can
mange all the distinctions that natural languages do, though,
admittedly, not always so simply.
Were the population of Loglan speakers
drawn from all the cultures of the world, one might expect to see
this wealth of possibilities get regular use. One might even see
dialects of Loglans arising depending on different habits of using
various items. But that population is almost entirely at least
competently anglophone and the non-native English speakers are drawn
primarily from other European languages. As a result, when not just
opting out of various possibilities, Loglans' speakers fall back on
the familiar: three tenses more or less, say, rather than aspects or
other systems. It is not clear how well understood a person would be
who used some significantly different array of devices from the
storehouse. So, despite its cross-cultural (if not neutral)
potential, in use, Loglans remain thoroughly Euro-American (and ANZ,
too, of course – sorry about that).
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