Message-Id: <9110021423.AA23847@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Date: Wed Oct 2 21:17:56 1991 Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: Another, simpler, question X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: "Dean C. Gahlon"'s message of Tue, 1 Oct 1991 10:29:17 CDT Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Wed Oct 2 21:17:56 1991 X-From-Space-Address: wb3ffv!mimsy!uunet.UUCP!dsinc.dsi.com!CUVMA.BITNET!LISTSERV I've been away from my e-mail for a few days and returned to 70 pieces of mail, so I suppose I should see if someone beat me to this, but I'm going to answer anyway. Dean Gahlon asks about alternate word-orders in Lojban: Sample sentence: le nanmu cu citka le cripu (the man eats the bridge). In Lojban, the order of sumti with respect to selbri is fairly free. The usual way of doing things is, as here, in "SVO" form (scare quotes because it's not really applicable in Lojban): x1 place, then selbri, then remaining sumti. The other common form is "SOV" form: {le nanmu le cripu cu citka}. This is also fine. Presumably, with many sumti, there's nothing wrong with putting the selbri anywhere among them (but see below). So, {mi le briju cu klama le zdani} ("I to the-office go from the-nest") is OK, too. Using "VSO" form, {citka le nanmu le cripu}, is quite grammatical, but poses a different problem. By current usage, since VSO is not a common word-order in many languages, the "selbri-first" word-order is reserved for "observative" sentences--ones with the x1 place ellipsized. Thus, the above sentence would probably be understood to mean "(something) eats the man ??? the bridge"--since "citka" only has 2 places, it would be unlear how the bridge related to it all. In private e-mail, jimc and I have discovered that we both would prefer to allow VSO to enjoy the same treatment as anything else, making it more consistent, as well as easier to use VSO (which we both seem to like). What are everyone's opinions? As to using {le cripu cu se citka le nanmu} (the "cu" is necessary here, otherwise we get "the bridgish eaten-thing"); that's another bit of hairy semantics. I like to consider it quite the same as {le nanmu cu citka le cripu}, but even I, like most others, often consider a SE-converted selbri somehow to have a different semantic loading than an unconverted one. So, when I hear "se citka" I think "is-eaten", and thus would get a different meaning for "le cripu cu se citka [zo'e]" as opposed to "[zo'e] citka le cripu", even though both have the same brivla (citka), and the same sumti ("zo'e" [elliptical "it"] in x1 (so to speak), and "le cripu" in x2). 'Course, you may not have gotten up to this yet, but there are other ways to mangle the word-order in a lojban predication. There's selma'o FA, which allows totally free reorginization (basically, the chief words in FA are fa, fe, fi, fo, & fu, which mark the next following sumti as belonging in the x1, x2, x3, x4, & x5 places of the current bridi, respectively. Followinga FA-marked sumti, subsequent unmarked sumti are considered to continue sequentially from the point specified by the FA.) Needless to say, this allows you to constuct truly confusing sentences, put more than one sumti into the same place with no conjunction, etc. Hope this clears things up. ~mark