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From: "Mike S." <maikxlx@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2019 20:15:31 -0400
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Glossing
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On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 8:45 AM Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:

> 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).


Indeed, I did not.


> > 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?


I am not sure what Pierre had in mind, but I responded mainly because it
just seemed like a fun challenge to gloss a simple example sentence.  FYI,
in case there was any possible confusion, maybe I should mention that I
have no intention of actually working out a system for Lojban that
maximally conforms to the Leipzig glossing rules, complete with
abbreviations and "-ive"-suffixed terminology for all the BAI and UI and
stuff like that which you mention later.


> 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 agree that many of those abbreviations would be out of place in learning
materials, but (as you indicate later) they might not be out of place in an
academic paper that dealt with Lojban, if such a paper were written (I seem
to recall at least one such paper being written a long time ago by N.
Nicholas).


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).
>

No matter what approach you take, the learner will need to do some
learning.  As an English-speaking learner, I would order my preferences in
terminology like this:

Use an English term in a conventional way > Use a neologism or Lojban term
> Use an English term in an unconventional way > Use an English term in a
bizarre way (e.g. "modal").


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).
>

As a learner, my way of thinking is like this:
- "brivla" is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stands as
either a noun, a verb, or a modifier of another brivla depending on its
position in syntax.
- "BAI" is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stands as either
an adverbial preposition or an adverb depending on position in syntax.
- And so on.

So while some of Lojban syntax is definitely odd in certain details (e.g.
the terminators), I think much of Lojban can be understood and described in
conventional linguistic terms, and that it's helpful to the learner to do
so.

Regarding "classifier", the WP articles use the term in the narrow sense of
counter-word (for countables) as specifically used in Chinese and languages
with similar systems; according to WP, even a measure-word (for
non-countables) is a different thing.  But WP is not always right and I
believe that somewhere or other I have seen "classifier" also used in a
much more broad sense to include any word or morpheme that indicates a noun
class, though perhaps I am mis-remembering.  At any rate, IMHO, the idea is
close enough that type-3 rafsi-prefixes can reasonably be called
"classifiers" without a lot of confusion.  So I think we agree on that.
(Also: the CLL uses "classifier" for rafsi-prefixes at least once.)


> > 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.


For clarity and extra information, it is possible to provide two lines of
"morphatim" glossing, the upper line using an all-caps abbreviation, and
the lower line providing a plainer English translation.

mi nelci la .lojban.
1.SG BRIVLA ART.PROPER CMEVLA
I/me like 0 Lojban.
"I like Lojban"


> 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.
>

Actually, I think it could be useful to insert another line of glossing
that shows the selma'o (we are not limited to using one or two lines),
thereby providing additional information.  However, I think it defeats the
purpose of glossing not to also provide English, and not to provide
relatively clear and precise glosses of what things mean (whether
abbreviations or short translations or both), and how the sentence meaning
is composed (not just its abstract syntax).


>
> 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).
>
>  I enjoyed the read and appreciate the thoughts and exposition of your
design philosophy!

mi'e .maik.
mu'o.

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<div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div di=
r=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"lt=
r"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div=
 dir=3D"ltr"><div dir=3D"ltr"></div><br><div class=3D"gmail_quote"><div dir=
=3D"ltr" class=3D"gmail_attr">On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 8:45 AM Bob LeChevali=
er &lt;<a href=3D"mailto:lojbab@lojban.org" target=3D"_blank">lojbab@lojban=
.org</a>&gt; wrote:<br></div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"mar=
gin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1=
ex">
I agree with the dot instead of the hyphen after &quot;carried&quot; (but n=
ot the <br>
URL insert, which I am pretty sure you did not intend).=C2=A0 </blockquote>=
<div><br>Indeed, I did not.<br><br>=C2=A0</div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_q=
uote" style=3D"margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,2=
04);padding-left:1ex">
&gt; I like my idea of e.g. VPZ .... VPT because abbreviations like VP are =
<br>
&gt; already widely understood among English-speaking linguists and the <br=
>
&gt; -Z...-T convention (or something like it) can be used to convey the <b=
r>
&gt; not-widely-understood functions of these Lojban particles, which IMHO =
<br>
&gt; ought to be one of the points of writing the gloss in the first place.=
<br>
<br>
The latter would seem to be the key issue.=C2=A0 Why are we writing the <br=
>
gloss?=C2=A0 </blockquote><div><br>I am not sure what Pierre had in mind, b=
ut I responded mainly because it just seemed like a fun challenge to gloss =
a simple example sentence.=C2=A0 FYI, in case there was any possible confus=
ion, maybe I should mention that I have no intention of actually working ou=
t a system for Lojban that maximally conforms to the Leipzig glossing rules=
, complete with abbreviations and &quot;-ive&quot;-suffixed terminology for=
 all the BAI and UI and stuff like that which you mention later.<br><br>=C2=
=A0</div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8e=
x;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">The most usual r=
eason for writing a gloss is to clarify what is <br>
going on for the reader.=C2=A0 The reader in this case is almost always a <=
br>
Lojban learner and not an &quot;English-speaking linguist&quot; where the l=
atter <br>
word refers to the academic professional field rather than the <br>
learner-of-languages.=C2=A0 Most learners don&#39;t know the &quot;widely-u=
nderstood&quot; <br>
abbreviations, nor the technical terms they represent.=C2=A0 Looking at the=
 <br>
wikipedia list of abbreviations=C2=A0 ( <br>
&lt;<a href=3D"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations=
" rel=3D"noreferrer" target=3D"_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o=
f_glossing_abbreviations</a>&gt; ), I <br>
didn&#39;t recognize most of the terms they represent, and I did a <br>
personal-if-amateur study of Comrie&#39;s linguistic universals work early =
<br>
in my Lojban designing effort.=C2=A0 I see no particular advantage in using=
 <br>
words that most people don&#39;t know, and especially if we are using them =
<br>
in ways that only approximate the technical meaning.<br></blockquote><div><=
br>I agree that many of those abbreviations would be out of place in learni=
ng materials, but (as you indicate later) they might not be out of place in=
 an academic paper that dealt with Lojban, if such a paper were written (I =
seem to recall at least one such paper being written a long time ago by N. =
Nicholas). <br><br><br></div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"mar=
gin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1=
ex">

I thus favor for teaching the language, the introduction of standard <br>
terminology that is specific to the Lojban design, and is not beholden <br>
to academic linguistic norms that learners likely won&#39;t know, and <br>
academics would be prone to quibble with (and indeed academics DID <br>
quibble with a lot of the usages that I made, and even more that JCB <br>
made in the original Loglan design).<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>No=
 matter what approach you take, the learner will need to do some learning.=
=C2=A0 As an English-speaking learner, I would order my preferences in term=
inology like this:<br><br></div><div>Use an English term in a conventional =
way &gt; Use a neologism or Lojban term &gt; Use an English term in an unco=
nventional way &gt; Use an English term in a bizarre way (e.g. &quot;modal&=
quot;).<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_q=
uote" style=3D"margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,2=
04);padding-left:1ex">

That is why brivla, bridi, selma&#39;o (and their various capitalized names=
) <br>
are used in Lojban documentation.=C2=A0 We don&#39;t need to argue whether =
a BAI <br>
is a modal, or an adverb, or a preposition.=C2=A0 It is serving the Lojban =
<br>
grammatical function of a BAI, which possibly might be any of those <br>
terms in some context that an academic linguist might quibble with.=C2=A0 (=
I <br>
am reminded of JCB&#39;s example which in Lojban is raumoi &quot;<a href=3D=
"http://enough.th" rel=3D"noreferrer" target=3D"_blank">enough.th</a>&quot;=
 as an <br>
ordinal number).=C2=A0 Similarly many of the members of UI could be assigne=
d <br>
to specific abbreviations on the list of the &quot;-ive&quot; variety, but =
in <br>
studying Lojban probably one should simply view them as UI for <br>
grammatical explanation, or possibly one of several categories of UI <br>
(which in my baseline cmavo lists are shown as UI1 (attitudinals), UI2 <br>
(evidentials), UI4 (emotion aspects). UI7 (emotion contours), etc.<br>
<br>
Of course when writing for the academic linguistic world, the gloss <br>
needs to conform to academic norms such as the &quot;Leipzig rules&quot; fo=
r <br>
morphemic glossing (see the google search I referenced to find these). <br>
But in such cases, I think the person writing the paper should be <br>
clarifying the abbreviations being used and what they are actually <br>
representing in Lojban that might not apply to other languages.=C2=A0 Makes=
 a <br>
lot more sense than a huge chunk of the abbreviations in the standard <br>
list that are defined solely by how they are used in a couple of <br>
specific languages e,g, &quot;adessive&quot;, &quot;antessive&quot;.=C2=A0 =
And then there are <br>
terms like &quot;classifier&quot; which Pierre just quibbled on as applying=
 only <br>
to how things are counted.=C2=A0 The wikipedia definition is more generic a=
nd <br>
it would definite include bic- as a classifier morpheme, which is in <br>
fact what it was designed to be, after the fashion of the Dyirbal <br>
classes described in <br>
&lt;<a href=3D"https://en.wikipedia.org" rel=3D"noreferrer" target=3D"_blan=
k">https://en.wikipedia.org</a>&gt;/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things,=
 <br>
except that Lojban doesn&#39;t have &quot;noun classes&quot; ( <br>
&lt;<a href=3D"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class" rel=3D"noreferrer"=
 target=3D"_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class</a>&gt; ) since=
 it doesn&#39;t have nouns <br>
- just brivla which might serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and in some <b=
r>
forms adverbs, and a bunch of other things.=C2=A0 I would argue that <br>
&quot;classifier&quot; is the right linguistics term, based on <br>
&lt;<a href=3D"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_%28linguistics%29" =
rel=3D"noreferrer" target=3D"_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifi=
er_(linguistics)</a>&gt; which states<br>
<br>
&quot;Languages with classifiers may have up to several hundred different <=
br>
classifiers, whereas those with noun classes (or in particular, genders) <b=
r>
tend to have a smaller number of classes, not always much dependent on <br>
the nouns&#39; meaning, and with a variety of grammatical consequences.&quo=
t;<br>
<br>
Lojban Type.III.fu&#39;ivla prefixes can be any of the rafsi (affixes) and =
<br>
are highly dependent on the brivla&#39;s &quot;meaning&quot; and with no gr=
ammatical <br>
consequences, and thus &quot;noun class&quot; would be the wrong term even =
if that <br>
was what actually inspired the design element (there were other <br>
considerations besides that book that led to this sort of classifier in <br=
>
Type.III.fu&#39;ivla, most especially the efforts in creating words for <br=
>
Linnean terms and chemical element names, both of which JCB had tackled <br=
>
in Loglan with poor solutions, but Lakoff&#39;s book was much talked about =
<br>
at the time).<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>As a learner, my way of t=
hinking is like this:<br></div><div>- &quot;brivla&quot; is a precise term =
for a class of Lojban word that stands as either a noun, a verb, or a modif=
ier of another brivla depending on its position in syntax.<br></div><div><d=
iv>- &quot;BAI&quot; is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stan=
ds as either an adverbial preposition or an adverb depending on position in=
 syntax.<br>- And so on.=C2=A0 <br><br>So while some of Lojban syntax is de=
finitely odd in certain details (e.g. the terminators), I think much of Loj=
ban can be understood and described in conventional linguistic terms, and t=
hat it&#39;s helpful to the learner to do so.=C2=A0 <br><br></div><div>Rega=
rding &quot;classifier&quot;, the WP articles use the term in the narrow se=
nse of counter-word (for countables)  as specifically used in Chinese and l=
anguages with similar systems; according to WP, even a measure-word (for no=
n-countables) is a different thing.=C2=A0 But WP is not always right and I =
believe that somewhere or other I have seen &quot;classifier&quot; also use=
d in a much more broad sense to include any word or morpheme that indicates=
 a noun class, though perhaps I am mis-remembering.=C2=A0 At any rate, IMHO=
, the idea is close enough that type-3 rafsi-prefixes can reasonably be cal=
led &quot;classifiers&quot; without a lot of confusion.=C2=A0 So I think we=
 agree on that.=C2=A0 (Also: the CLL uses &quot;classifier&quot; for rafsi-=
prefixes at least once.)<br></div><div><br><br></div></div><div>=C2=A0<br><=
/div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;bo=
rder-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
&gt; You can use dots to add features to a gloss.=C2=A0 French &quot;la&quo=
t; might be <br>
&gt; glossed as ART.DEF.FEM and Lojban &quot;loi&quot; might be ART.MASS.<b=
r>
<br>
It might, *but* I think that would be an incorrect choice.=C2=A0 The use of=
 <br>
capitalized terms are supposed to be about referencing grammatical <br>
concepts and effects, and not content concepts.=C2=A0 </blockquote><div><br=
></div><div>For clarity and extra information, it is possible to provide tw=
o lines of &quot;morphatim&quot; glossing, the upper line using an all-caps=
 abbreviation, and the lower line providing a plainer English translation.<=
br><br></div><div>mi nelci la .lojban.<br></div><div><a href=3D"http://1.SG=
">1.SG</a> BRIVLA ART.PROPER CMEVLA<br></div><div>I/me like 0 Lojban.<br></=
div><div>&quot;I like Lojban&quot;<br></div><div><br></div><div>=C2=A0</div=
><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border=
-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Arguably, all of the <br=
>
members of selma&#39;o LE are simply articles, and which flavor of article =
<br>
has utterly no grammatical effect, UI and BAI and PA would also be <br>
grammatical categories that in theory have no grammatical effect, and I <br=
>
only favor sub-categorizing them (with numbers after the selma&#39;o) <br>
because in actual usage, attitudinals, evidentials, contours, etc have <br>
distinctly different effects on meaning even while having the same <br>
nominal grammar, and those sub-categories are useful in explaining <br>
actual usage in Lojban to a learner (or perhaps a linguist), whereas the <b=
r>
various &quot;-ive&quot; linguistic terms in the standard list that might b=
e <br>
applied only to individual cmavo would imply grammatical functionality <br>
that isn&#39;t part of the language (e.g. &quot;fa&#39;a&quot; which I thin=
k corresponds <br>
to &quot;adessive or venitive case&quot; but in fact has nothing to do with=
 <br>
linguistic &quot;case&quot;, and is two linguistic terms covering something=
 that <br>
is only one cmavo in a set having real grammatical value (selma&#39;o FAhA)=
, <br>
because they combine in a grammatically predictable way with MOhI, where <b=
r>
I suspect there are no standard terms for most of the other members of <br>
FAhA that have identical grammar but are not adessive, and nothing so <br>
far as I know that can describe MOhI).<br>
<br>
Loglan/Lojban was designed by intent to be extreme linguistically with <br>
respect to many language norms that are mandatory in some languages <br>
while being ignored in other languages.=C2=A0 People know about number and =
<br>
tense as being important parts of Lojban&#39;s elimination of mandatory <br=
>
features, but equally important are these other lesser known features <br>
that are also non-mandatory, but are permitted (even though they may <br>
have no clear correspondence in the speakers native language, hence <br>
things like our aorist-like tenses (ZAhO), evidentials, etc.)<br>
<br>
How much a language speaker comes to use these categories in Lojban that <b=
r>
are not used in their native languages, and to what effect, is clearly <br>
part of the realm implied by the Sapir-Whorf testing aspect of <br>
Loglan/Lojban.=C2=A0 I have frequently said that Lojban&#39;s enormous and =
highly <br>
flexible attitudinal system might show more in the way of Sapir-Whorf <br>
effects than the features of the original Loglan design (formal logical <br=
>
connectives, logical predicate brivla, uniquely parsible &quot;metaphoric&q=
uot; <br>
modification).=C2=A0 TLI Loglan lacks that enormity and flexibility in its =
<br>
corresponding set.<br>
<br>
And the features that might make a difference in forms of usage are the <br=
>
ones linguists SHOULD be interested in when trying to understand how <br>
Lojban grammar works.=C2=A0 For that reason, the use of selma&#39;o names w=
ith <br>
subcategory numbers where applicable is far better than the use of <br>
standard terminology, and also has the benefit of being more <br>
understandable to the layperson who doesn&#39;t know the linguistic jargon.=
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Actually, I think it could be useful t=
o insert another line of glossing that shows the selma&#39;o (we are not li=
mited to using one or two lines), thereby providing additional information.=
=C2=A0 However, I think it defeats the purpose of glossing not to also prov=
ide English, and not to provide relatively clear and precise glosses of wha=
t things mean (whether abbreviations or short translations or both), and ho=
w the sentence meaning is composed (not just its abstract syntax).<br></div=
><div>=C2=A0</div><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0px 0px=
 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<br>
On the other hand, I once proposed to some academic linguists the use of <b=
r>
Lojban as itself a form of linguistic jargon interlanguage for conveying <b=
r>
glosses of other languages and respecting their features.=C2=A0 Lojban in <=
br>
effect has a superset of most of the features of pretty much all other <br>
languages, even if they aren&#39;t conveyed via mandatory grammatical <br>
features in Lojban.=C2=A0 Thus Lojban can convey the complexity of a Nootka=
 <br>
sentence/word as a Lojban tanru or even a many-part lujvo, as well as <br>
the variety of cases in the Finno-Ugric languages.=C2=A0 Using the terms <b=
r>
invented to describe these features in academic descriptions of those <br>
languages limits one to an audience of those who know the language <br>
enough to understand the terms.=C2=A0 Lojban as an interlanguage loses <br>
information about what is conveyed via grammar words vs via content <br>
words in the source language, but might be more effective in conveying <br>
the semantics that result.<br>
<br>
Enough for now.=C2=A0 I&#39;ve essentially denigrated the purpose of Pierre=
&#39;s <br>
original question, which was not what I started trying to do in <br>
answering him.=C2=A0 But it has been a long while since a question came up =
<br>
here that strongly ties back to the original design concepts of the <br>
language, as well as Loglan/Lojban&#39;s ties, both positive and negative, =
<br>
to the academic linguistic community (which for the most part haven&#39;t <=
br>
had much respect for artificial languages, though I&#39;m not in tune enoug=
h <br>
to know whether the attitudes of academic linguistics might have changed <b=
r>
since the 80s when Lojban was designed).<br>
<br></blockquote><div>=C2=A0I enjoyed the read and appreciate the thoughts =
and exposition of your design philosophy!<br><br></div><div>mi&#39;e .maik.=
<br></div><div>mu&#39;o.<br></div></div><br clear=3D"all">=C2=A0<br></div><=
/div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></di=
v>

<p></p>

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