From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:59:41 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 14 Jan 1993 16:46:35 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 6690; Thu, 14 Jan 93 16:45:32 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3721; Thu, 14 Jan 93 16:45:15 EST Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 19:15:37 GMT Reply-To: C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Sender: Lojban list From: C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Subject: Re: James Cooke Brown on SVO order To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Thu Jan 14 19:15:37 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: (John posted some text by JCB on SVO order) It is remarkable how weak these arguments are, from the perspective of 25 years later. Consider the following. 1. The major justification was in terms of imperatives. This was a strong argument as long as "the only way of defining imperatives that is consistent with the other patterns of an uninflected language" was to omit the leading argument. But as John points out, we have an elegant and flexible alternative method. (JCB's original argument about imperatives stressed the importance of minimal morphological material in them, and gave examples from natural languages; but in fact there are plenty of evidence of natural languages having for example 'polite' imperatives with more morphology in them.) 2. Given that the omitted first place now signals an observative rather than an imperative, the argument becomes feeble. Even if observatives had continued to be used as apparently intended, statements such as "there is apparently little scope for long-windedness in .... drawing the hearer's attention to things in the environment" are highly dubious. It is true that there are short observatives ("Delicious!") but equally there are long and tortuous ones ("A man on a unicycle eating cream cakes!"). Furthermore, I observe that 'observatives' are not in practice limited to this use in current Lojban writing and speaking, but that lojbo feel free to omit the x1 in just the same way as they do any other argument. Indeed, constructions like "cumki falenu ...." (it is possible that ....) where the x1 is postposed by an explicit x1 marker ('fa'), are syntactically equivalent, and not unusual with words like 'cumki'. Thus I would claim that in current Lojban usage, an observative is a syntactic for