From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Jul 24 01:19:43 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 24 Jul 2005 01:19:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1Dwbi3-0004CJ-DT for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 24 Jul 2005 01:19:43 -0700 Received: from ms-smtp-03.texas.rr.com ([24.93.47.42] helo=ms-smtp-03-eri0.texas.rr.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1Dwbhz-0004CC-Dz for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 24 Jul 2005 01:19:42 -0700 Received: from hypermetrics.com (cpe-66-68-164-156.austin.res.rr.com [66.68.164.156]) by ms-smtp-03-eri0.texas.rr.com (8.12.10/8.12.7) with ESMTP id j6O8JZRZ022461 for ; Sun, 24 Jul 2005 03:19:36 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <42E34F17.4010907@hypermetrics.com> Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 03:19:35 -0500 From: Hal Fulton User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031114 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Parts of speech, parts of sentence Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed X-Virus-Scanned: Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 1638 X-Approved-By: hal9000@hypermetrics.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: hal9000@hypermetrics.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners When I was a kid studying English grammar, I was a little confused at first about the parts of speech and the parts of a sentence. "Noun" is an example of the former and "predicate nominative" is an example of the latter. To add to the confusion, a "verb" is both. To further add to the confusion, some words can be used in more than one way. Did you scratch your arm? (scratch, verb used as a verb) I see a scratch there. (scratch, noun used as direct object) Although I caught on, I think a lot of people didn't. And I don't think the teachers even realized this was a potential problem. If we say "All predicate nominatives are nouns, but not all nouns are predicate nominatives" -- well, in a way, we've said the truth, and in a way, we've spoken nonsense. It disregards the fact that these are different categories. It sounds like the statement we make in geometry about squares and rectangles, but it isn't analogous. This is all to say: I think this is one thing tripping me up in Lojban. It's not possible to draw a simple Venn diagram or anything if you're mixing parts of the sentence with parts of speech. (Not that it's necessarily possible anyway.) I perceive a "gismu" to be a part of speech, and a "sumti" to be a part of the sentence. I also see a "cmene" as a part of speech. Is that reasonable? Some of these may necessarily be the same -- a cmavo is a cmavo, I suppose. I would guess it might be in either/both categories. So, can we come up with definitive lists of these? I think it would help me (and possibly others). Hal