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Re: [lojban] Glossing



I hope my URLS appear correctly here.

On 4/25/2019 9:55 PM, Mike S. wrote:
On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 5:20 PM Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org <mailto:lojbab@lojban.org>> wrote: > i   lo  bicrbombu  cu  se       bevri      mi o'adai  lo  mamta  be  mi vau
     > SEP ART bumblebee? SEP PASS.INV-carried-by-me (pride-EMPATH)
    [-to] ART mother-OBJ-me TERMIN


I am no expert at glossing (far from it), but I think there are some possible points of confusion here where things are supposed to line up. I think hyphens should generally indicate morpheme breaks within words. Dots seem to be used when several gloss-components hold together in one object-language morpheme.  So your gloss ought to be something like:

SEP ART bumblebee SEP PASS.INV carried.by <http://carried.by> me (pride-EMPATH) [to] ART mother OBJ me TERMIN

I agree with the dot instead of the hyphen after "carried" (but not the URL insert, which I am pretty sure you did not intend). And I should have used a dot instead of a hyphen before the "to" for the same reason (or maybe a triple dot omitted.ellipsis since this is continuing a previous paradigm).

    I think only SEP (separator), TERMIN (terminator) and EMPATH (empathic
    attitudinal) are not in the standard abbreviations list, and the rest
    should be pretty obvious.  I also used the bracketed [-to] which is
    actually part of the gloss of bevri, as symbolized by the hyphen,
    put in
    a more readable position (5+ place brivla would be even harder to
    express without such readability aids).


I like my idea of e.g. VPZ .... VPT because abbreviations like VP are already widely understood among English-speaking linguists and the -Z...-T convention (or something like it) can be used to convey the not-widely-understood functions of these Lojban particles, which IMHO ought to be one of the points of writing the gloss in the first place.

The latter would seem to be the key issue. Why are we writing the gloss? The most usual reason for writing a gloss is to clarify what is going on for the reader. The reader in this case is almost always a Lojban learner and not an "English-speaking linguist" where the latter word refers to the academic professional field rather than the learner-of-languages. Most learners don't know the "widely-understood" abbreviations, nor the technical terms they represent. Looking at the wikipedia list of abbreviations ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations> ), I didn't recognize most of the terms they represent, and I did a personal-if-amateur study of Comrie's linguistic universals work early in my Lojban designing effort. I see no particular advantage in using words that most people don't know, and especially if we are using them in ways that only approximate the technical meaning.

I thus favor for teaching the language, the introduction of standard terminology that is specific to the Lojban design, and is not beholden to academic linguistic norms that learners likely won't know, and academics would be prone to quibble with (and indeed academics DID quibble with a lot of the usages that I made, and even more that JCB made in the original Loglan design).

That is why brivla, bridi, selma'o (and their various capitalized names) are used in Lojban documentation. We don't need to argue whether a BAI is a modal, or an adverb, or a preposition. It is serving the Lojban grammatical function of a BAI, which possibly might be any of those terms in some context that an academic linguist might quibble with. (I am reminded of JCB's example which in Lojban is raumoi "enough.th" as an ordinal number). Similarly many of the members of UI could be assigned to specific abbreviations on the list of the "-ive" variety, but in studying Lojban probably one should simply view them as UI for grammatical explanation, or possibly one of several categories of UI (which in my baseline cmavo lists are shown as UI1 (attitudinals), UI2 (evidentials), UI4 (emotion aspects). UI7 (emotion contours), etc.

Of course when writing for the academic linguistic world, the gloss needs to conform to academic norms such as the "Leipzig rules" for morphemic glossing (see the google search I referenced to find these). But in such cases, I think the person writing the paper should be clarifying the abbreviations being used and what they are actually representing in Lojban that might not apply to other languages. Makes a lot more sense than a huge chunk of the abbreviations in the standard list that are defined solely by how they are used in a couple of specific languages e,g, "adessive", "antessive". And then there are terms like "classifier" which Pierre just quibbled on as applying only to how things are counted. The wikipedia definition is more generic and it would definite include bic- as a classifier morpheme, which is in fact what it was designed to be, after the fashion of the Dyirbal classes described in <https://en.wikipedia.org>/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things, except that Lojban doesn't have "noun classes" ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class> ) since it doesn't have nouns - just brivla which might serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and in some forms adverbs, and a bunch of other things. I would argue that "classifier" is the right linguistics term, based on <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)> which states

"Languages with classifiers may have up to several hundred different classifiers, whereas those with noun classes (or in particular, genders) tend to have a smaller number of classes, not always much dependent on the nouns' meaning, and with a variety of grammatical consequences."

Lojban Type.III.fu'ivla prefixes can be any of the rafsi (affixes) and are highly dependent on the brivla's "meaning" and with no grammatical consequences, and thus "noun class" would be the wrong term even if that was what actually inspired the design element (there were other considerations besides that book that led to this sort of classifier in Type.III.fu'ivla, most especially the efforts in creating words for Linnean terms and chemical element names, both of which JCB had tackled in Loglan with poor solutions, but Lakoff's book was much talked about at the time).

    I don't sense that morphemic glossing necessarily is as
    comprehensive in
    the structure words as Mike S's attempt provides.  After all, English
has several kinds of articles and they all probably gloss as ART. There
    is an abbreviation for "definite" (DEF), but none for "indefinite", two
    of the kinds of articles in English.  But probably if we wanted to
    systematize glossing in Lojban we might invent abbreviations to
    distinguish lo, la, lei, and loi (there is no abbreviation for
    mass-nouns either in the standard list)

You can use dots to add features to a gloss.  French "la" might be glossed as ART.DEF.FEM and Lojban "loi" might be ART.MASS.

It might, *but* I think that would be an incorrect choice. The use of capitalized terms are supposed to be about referencing grammatical concepts and effects, and not content concepts. Arguably, all of the members of selma'o LE are simply articles, and which flavor of article has utterly no grammatical effect, UI and BAI and PA would also be grammatical categories that in theory have no grammatical effect, and I only favor sub-categorizing them (with numbers after the selma'o) because in actual usage, attitudinals, evidentials, contours, etc have distinctly different effects on meaning even while having the same nominal grammar, and those sub-categories are useful in explaining actual usage in Lojban to a learner (or perhaps a linguist), whereas the various "-ive" linguistic terms in the standard list that might be applied only to individual cmavo would imply grammatical functionality that isn't part of the language (e.g. "fa'a" which I think corresponds to "adessive or venitive case" but in fact has nothing to do with linguistic "case", and is two linguistic terms covering something that is only one cmavo in a set having real grammatical value (selma'o FAhA), because they combine in a grammatically predictable way with MOhI, where I suspect there are no standard terms for most of the other members of FAhA that have identical grammar but are not adessive, and nothing so far as I know that can describe MOhI).

Loglan/Lojban was designed by intent to be extreme linguistically with respect to many language norms that are mandatory in some languages while being ignored in other languages. People know about number and tense as being important parts of Lojban's elimination of mandatory features, but equally important are these other lesser known features that are also non-mandatory, but are permitted (even though they may have no clear correspondence in the speakers native language, hence things like our aorist-like tenses (ZAhO), evidentials, etc.)

How much a language speaker comes to use these categories in Lojban that are not used in their native languages, and to what effect, is clearly part of the realm implied by the Sapir-Whorf testing aspect of Loglan/Lojban. I have frequently said that Lojban's enormous and highly flexible attitudinal system might show more in the way of Sapir-Whorf effects than the features of the original Loglan design (formal logical connectives, logical predicate brivla, uniquely parsible "metaphoric" modification). TLI Loglan lacks that enormity and flexibility in its corresponding set.

And the features that might make a difference in forms of usage are the ones linguists SHOULD be interested in when trying to understand how Lojban grammar works. For that reason, the use of selma'o names with subcategory numbers where applicable is far better than the use of standard terminology, and also has the benefit of being more understandable to the layperson who doesn't know the linguistic jargon.

On the other hand, I once proposed to some academic linguists the use of Lojban as itself a form of linguistic jargon interlanguage for conveying glosses of other languages and respecting their features. Lojban in effect has a superset of most of the features of pretty much all other languages, even if they aren't conveyed via mandatory grammatical features in Lojban. Thus Lojban can convey the complexity of a Nootka sentence/word as a Lojban tanru or even a many-part lujvo, as well as the variety of cases in the Finno-Ugric languages. Using the terms invented to describe these features in academic descriptions of those languages limits one to an audience of those who know the language enough to understand the terms. Lojban as an interlanguage loses information about what is conveyed via grammar words vs via content words in the source language, but might be more effective in conveying the semantics that result.

Enough for now. I've essentially denigrated the purpose of Pierre's original question, which was not what I started trying to do in answering him. But it has been a long while since a question came up here that strongly ties back to the original design concepts of the language, as well as Loglan/Lojban's ties, both positive and negative, to the academic linguistic community (which for the most part haven't had much respect for artificial languages, though I'm not in tune enough to know whether the attitudes of academic linguistics might have changed since the 80s when Lojban was designed).

lojbab

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