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Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:39:31 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?
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 Content preview:  John E Clifford wrote: > This is all getting very confusing
    to me; I either don't get the point > of various comments or I don't see
   the relevance of them to what I think > is the topic at hand (which long ago
    ceased to be about learning Lojban > -- we ought to change the title). Let
    try to sort some things out for > my own benefit. > SAEss is a late derivative
    (and probably the result of a > misunderstanding) of SAEsl, a term Whorf
   apparently coined. It happens > that all of the ss languages are also sl,
   which reenforces the confusion. > The fact that Lojban has adjectives and
   verbs and common nouns -- or > doesn't -- is largely irrelevant to the question
    whether it is a SAE > ("thing"), property, process or sensation language.
    [...] 
 
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John E Clifford wrote:
> This is all getting very confusing to me; I either don't get the point
> of various comments or I don't see the relevance of them to what I think
> is the topic at hand (which long ago ceased to be about learning Lojban
> -- we ought to change the title).  Let try to sort some things out for
> my own benefit.
> SAEss is a late derivative (and probably the result of a
> misunderstanding) of SAEsl, a term Whorf apparently coined.  It happens
> that all of the ss languages are also sl, which reenforces the confusion.
> The fact that Lojban has adjectives and verbs and common nouns -- or
> doesn't -- is largely irrelevant to the question whether it is a SAE
> ("thing"), property, process or sensation language.

lo, loka lopu'u, and loli'i should be able to express these, 
respectively (and we have a few other abstractors as well.  Whether they 
semantically match the targeted languages is less clear.

I guess you might argue that sticking lo on a property, process, etc 
makes it grammatically a "thing", but I think that is an artifact of 
translating the expressions into English, where sumti become grammatical 
nouns or gerunds.  Nora has always looked at brivla as being more 
verblike than any other part of speech, with the various cmavo acting on 
the grammatical roles but not really changing the Lojban semantics 
(though again translating the semantics into English tends to invoke 
English parts of speech).

I am still remembering my efforts at translating Nootka, wherein I 
expressed entire sentences as complex tanru, never using any sumti at all.

> It can (more or
> less by design) reproduce the effects of all sorts of languages, but to
> do so, it must convert properties or processes or sensations into
> things.

No.  cmavo convert brivla into sumti or mexso or ..., but none of those 
are necessarily "things".

lojbab


-- 
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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