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Date:         Fri, 14 Feb 1992 10:42:00 EST
Reply-To: "61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!gilson!61510.decnet>
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From: "61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!gilson!61510.decnet>
Subject:      "Lojban adjective"
X-To:         lojban <lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu>
To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>
Status: RO

>Bruce writes:

>>You mean in Lojban you can't modify a proper name by a Lojban adjective? You
>>can't talk about "the first Elizabeth" or "the most populous Springfield in
>>the United States"? This seems to be a weakness of the language if so.

>Watch it.  What is a Lojban "adjective"?  Lojban has no adjectives.  The
>part of speech doesn't apply.

Sorry. Let me explain what I mean. A sumti may modify another. If I say (sorry
for reverting to Old Loglan, but I do not know the modern Lojban words) "le
narmi glida grupa cefli," as JCB did in the very first passage that appeared
in the Loglan article in Scientific American in 1960, we may agree that the
role of "cefli" is different from the other three predicate words. It is a
head in an AH construction, a noun in English terminology. The other three
are attributes in successively nested AH constructions, or adjectives in English
terminology. I maintain that although a _word_ in Lojban is not a noun, a verb,
or an adjective, we can still talk of its usages in those terms, defining a
"verb" as the word used as the main selbri in a sentence/clause, a "noun"
as any of the words filling the sumti-places of that word, and an "adjective"
as any sumti that modifies another in an AH type construction.

                                                     Bruce