From pycyn@aol.com Fri Oct 06 07:24:49 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: Pycyn@aol.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_0_3); 6 Oct 2000 14:24:48 -0000 Received: (qmail 21740 invoked from network); 6 Oct 2000 14:24:48 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 6 Oct 2000 14:24:48 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-d07.mx.aol.com) (205.188.157.39) by mta3 with SMTP; 6 Oct 2000 14:24:48 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-d07.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.26.) id a.46.b8411aa (4538) for ; Fri, 6 Oct 2000 10:24:39 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <46.b8411aa.270f3aa6@aol.com> Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 10:24:38 EDT Subject: Re: [lojban] Why place structure? To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com In a message dated 00-10-05 23:01:01 EDT, daishin writes: << Hello(coi), I read some WWW-pages about Lojban, and I am interested in. But I felt that the "place-structure" is quite difficult to memory and use. For example, there is a sentence mi jbena de'i li pamupi'ebi --- (A) (I was born in 15/8) in "A Lojban Beginners' Course" (Robin Turner) http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin/lesson5.html But according to the gismu list, the place structure of "jbena" is: x1 is born to x2 at time x3 [birthday] and place x4 [birthplace] So I think that one can say: mi jbena zo'e li pamupi'ebi --- (B) My questions are: (1) Which is better, (A) or (B) ?>> Well, I prefer B, or even {mi jbena fi li pamupi'ebi}; if you have a place in the predicate, use it. The alternative is strictly redundant: "I was born to someone on some day at some place on day 15/8" <<(2) Do we have to memory the place structure of "jbena" and all the other gismu ?>> Yes, but once you do start to use them, they tend to stick in memory. It is not easy at first, but it is possible. And, at least for now, you can look it up. We do need some better aids for this than the raw memorization that we now mainly work with. << (3) What is the advantage of the "place-structure," which is not so often appear in other natural/artificial languages?>> I'm not sure that it is an advantage, just a choice amongst a variety of options. In this case, the choice was determined by the underlying language scheme: symbolic logic, which has predicates defined with place structure, but not additional means of attaching arguments. Lojban, realistically, provided those additional means as well (strictly, means of creating new arguments with new place structures from old ones). As for place structures being uncommon, they are very common, though rather restricted. Almost every language I can think of has some place structure with some of its predicates, that is, situations where you can tell the function of a term in a sentence only by where it occurs in the sentence. English is perhaps an extreme case, regularly using place for subject, direct object, and often indirect object (their exact functions depending on the verb involved). Am I right in remembering that Japanese goes rather in the other direction and regularly flags all of these functions? But even then it places the expressions in a certain order in most cases. Anyhow, the form used in the symbolism of Logic was not created out of thin air, but was bsed upon the langauges the logicians spoke (albeit rather loosely). >|83 pc