From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 13 2002 - 03:27:33 GMT
>http://www.loglan.org/what-is-loglan.html
>
>From "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" (1929)
>Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the
>world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the
>mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression
>in their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to
>reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely
>an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or
>reflection: The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large
>extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two
>languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the
>same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are
>distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels
>attached...Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more
>at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose...We
>see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the
>language habits of our community predispose certain choices of
>interpretation.
>
>
>In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown attempted to separate language and culture to
>test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He suggested the creation of a new
>language-one not bound to any particular culture--to distinguish the causes
>from the effects of language, culture, and thought. He called this
>artificial language LOGLAN, which is short for Logical Language. According
>to Riner, LOGLAN was designed as an experimental language to answer the
>question: "In what ways is human thought limited and directed by the
>language in which one thinks?" (1990).
>
______________________________________________
I had this sent to me the other day.
eudemonia (yoo-di-MO-nee-uh) noun, also eudaemonia
1. A state of happiness and well-being.
2. In Aristotelian philosophy, happiness in a life of activity
governed by reason.
[From Greek eudaimonia (happiness), from eudaimon (having a good genius,
happy), from eu- (good) + daimon (spirit, fate, fortune).]
December 15 will be the anniversary of the birth of L.L. Zamenhof
(1859-1917), physician and philologist, best known as the creator of
Esperanto. Designed as a common International language, Esperanto is
the most popular artificial language ever devised.
Why would one want to have a single language rather than a rainbow of
languages, dialects, sounds, and intonations? How else would we have
multi-lingual puns, lost-in-translation gems, and other cross-linguistic
humor? And what better way to understand other cultures but by understanding
their languages? The etymology of the name Esperanto (from Latin sperare,
to hope) gives us a good indication of the motivation behind its invention.
Growing up in Poland, among an ethnic population of Poles, Germans, and
mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews, Zamenhof witnessed violence arising from
language conflicts and envisioned a world that had a common tongue, free
of ambiguity and misunderstanding. His goal was not to replace other
languages with Esperanto. Rather, he hoped to create an auxiliary language
to link people who spoke in diverse tongues. He called it Esperanto, from
his pseudonym Dr. Esperanto, literally one who hopes.
While Zamenhof's vision of a single international language was a lofty one
and he had noble intentions, Esperanto achieved limited success. It is still
the most popular invented language, though far from being adopted worldwide.
For better or worse, English has become the Esperanto of the 21st century.
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