From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:59:53 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 12 Jan 1993 14:43:45 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 5297; Tue, 12 Jan 93 14:42:49 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 0551; Tue, 12 Jan 93 14:42:09 EST Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 11:33:06 -0500 Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Subject: James Cooke Brown on SVO order X-To: conlang , Lojban List To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Tue Jan 12 06:33:06 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: The following text was originally written by JCB in 1967-68, published as part of Chapter 6 of his book >Loglan 2: Methods of Construction<, and reprinted in >The Loglanist< 1:2, p. 54ff. Since none of these sources is readily available, I am sending it to both Lojban and conlang lists. It provides an interesting insight into the mind of a language designer at work. [JCB begins by defending SVO as the order of choice because of its prevalence in Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish, French, and German, 6 of his 8 source languages.] There was a time, however, when [VSO] order was seriously, if briefly, considered for Loglan. This order has a certain traditional charm for logicians -- witness the standard schematic notation 'Fxy' for a two-place predicate, for example -- and for certain purposes of manipulation it has undeniable advantages. But for a spoken and, at the same time, uninflected language the VSO order turns out to be quite unsuitable. The argument which discloses that result may bear repeating here. We note first that, on the most fundamental grounds, arguments are not to be distinguished \it{except} by word order in Loglan. Thus we entertain no "case endings", or other marking devices, by which "Subjects" can be intrinsically distinguished from "Objects". \footnote{I leave the argument behind \it{this} remark, however, to the reader.} One form of the argument then hinges on the management of imperatives. \footnote{It could as well be based on specified descriptions; see below.} [Editorial interjection: Both Loglan and Lojban have to some extent withdrawn from the original rejection of case marking, and have created a set of optional case tags. However, neither form of the language uses them much. In Lojban, the argument about "imperatives" which follows must be replaced by an exactly parallel argument about "observatives", since Lojban interprets a V-first sentence as an elliptical subject without imperative coloring. I have added bracketed comments to the next paragraph giving the Lojban, as distinct from the Loglan, viewpoint.] Now imperatives [resp. observatives] are almost invariably short forms; there is apparently little scope for long-windedness in giving warnings or commands [resp. drawing the hearer's attention to things in the environment]. Moreover, the first argument of an imperatively [resp. observatively] used predicate is almost always the hearer [resp. understood from context], and as the omission of any constant feature of a message cannot reduce its information content, first arguments are nearly always [resp. always] omitted in the imperative [resp. observative] mode (e.g. as in English 'Go!' [resp. 'Delicious!']). But if we omit the first argument from the form PAA (Predicate-Argument-Argument) -- for arguments, note, are to be taken as indistinguishable -- we obtain a result that does not differ from the result of omitting a second argument, or a third. Therefore the adoption of the PAA schema as the standard order for the Loglan sentence deprives us of a good way of defining imperatives [resp. observatives]. In fact, it deprives us of the only way of defining imperatives that is consistent with the other patterns of an uninflected language. [Lojban makes use of a special "imperative 2nd person pronoun" which may appear as any argument, thus permitting more complex imperative forms while remaining "uninflected".] Similar difficulties arise with specified descriptions. Thus if 'He gave the horse to John' is to become something like 'Gave he the horse John', how \it{do} you say 'the giver of the horse to John'? A form like 'the give the horse John' will not do, since it is the designation of the giver, not the gift, which normally follows the predicate. Only by introducing some sort of dummy argument into the 'Fxyz' form, e.g. 'F-yz', can we keep the meaning clear. But this is awkward. These seemed good reasons not to use the VSO form, especially as the SVO form does not suffer this disaster. Thus, the schema APA yields an unmistakable PA in the imperative [resp. observative] mood. Incidentally, the SOV order ('He the horse John gave') collapses into the same kind of ambiguity under the pressure of abbreviation. (Is 'The horse John give' an imperative, or an incomplete declaration?) Thus, curiously enough, and independent of any facts about the distribution of these arrangements among languages, we would have been forced to abandon the logicians' notational convention anyway. For once incomplete or abbreviated forms are considered -- and in a spoken language they are far more frequent than unabbreviated forms -- the predicate can no longer be treated as a prefix or a suffix of its uninflected arguments ('Fxy' or 'xyF') but must be treated as an infix ('xFy'). It is only of suche initially infixed arrangements that the fragments left by the removal of uninflected arguments (e.g. 'xF' and 'Fy') remain reconstructable and, hence, grammatically clear. \footnote{In these analyses, by the way, we may have isolated the ambiguity- avoidance mechanism behind one of Greenberg's most interesting universals, namely that all SOV languages have case systems (his Universal 41). I am surprised that the principle does not hold for VSO languages as well. If it did, we should then have strong evidence for the even more interesting converse principle that only SVO languages can be analytic: a fact we suspect anyway, but we would then know why.} -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban.