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From: Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Introduction to Lojban. How to quickly create sentences
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 23:49:58 -0500
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On Saturday, February 01, 2014 Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> Please explain what are verbs and nouns in general. And whether those terms
> are logical at all. My belief is that they are not.
> And if you start teaching newbies such terms as "sumti", "tanru" and
> "sumtcita" instead of intuitive "verbs", "compound verbs" and
> "prepositions" ... you'll get the current community of geeks. Most people
> are just frightened of those lojbanic terms.

Here's an attempt at defining these words:

A verb is a word that takes arguments (sumti) and belongs to a class of words 
of which all take arguments (there may be some that take zero arguments) and a 
significant portion denote actions.

A noun is a word other than a pronoun which does not take arguments and can 
serve, maybe with an article or maybe without, as an argument to a verb. A 
significant portion of the class of nouns denote persons, places, or things.

"bajra" is definitely a verb. "djan" is definitely a noun. "la .djan. bajra" is 
a sentence consisting of a noun (with the article) and a verb.

"mlatu" in "le mlatu cu bajra" is not a noun. Even though it is, with its 
article, an argument of "bajra", it still can take arguments, as in "le mlatu 
be la .sfinks. cu bajra".

"bercribe" can arguably be both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it means "is a 
polar bear of some subspecies". As a noun, it means "Ursa Minor" (subject to 
the proviso that cmene in Lojban can be polysemic).

Suppose you were teaching Tok Pisin, which distinguishes not only "we not 
including you" from "we including you" but also "we two not including you" 
from "we more than two not including you". Would you make up a word that means 
"we" without such distinctions? If you made up and used such a word, would the 
Tok Pisin speakers understand it?

On Saturday, February 01, 2014 09:54:47 Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 8:28 AM, Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org> wrote:
> > #36: There's no infinitive in Lojban, as verbs are not inflected. "lo ka
> > broda"
> > is an abstraction phrase. It can be translated as an infinitive, but that
> > doesn't make it one.
> 
> If you say "There is no such thing in Lojban" one can conclude Lojban is a
> underdeveloped language.
> Isn't {broda lo ka [ce'u] brode} = y(x, f(x)) ? I always thought this is
> exactly what an infinitive is.

Is modern Russian an underdeveloped language because it doesn't have an aorist 
tense? Is Arabic an underdeveloped language because it doesn't have an 
infinitive?

> English "we" means "I and at least one another person". A clear and useful
> word without any polysemy. Lojban is less logical than English, right ?

In most languages that have an infinitive, the infinitive does not conjugate 
according to its subject and is used most often without a subject; if it has a 
subject, it's shown in a different way than in finite verbs. The "lo nu broda" 
construct can take a subject in the same way that "broda" can; the construct 
is simply preceding a clause with "lo nu" and following it with elidable "kei 
ku".
-- 
ve ka'a ro klaji la .romas. se jmaji

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