From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:58:28 2010 Reply-To: Steven Belknap Sender: Lojban list Date: Tue Dec 17 10:11:14 1996 From: Steven Belknap X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-UIDL: 491a992755a5de07b85cb345b8b5f783 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1434 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Dec 17 10:11:14 1996 X-From-Space-Address: - Message-ID: > 1. In Lojban, why is the first argument of a predicate put before that > predicate? ... Shouldn't the predicate be first, and then its > arguments? The reason is historical. The default is SVO in lojban, because James Cooke Brown decided it ought be that way in Loglan (see the 1960 Scientific American article by Brown). Loglan was an early version of lojban. He did this for reasons that have never been particularly clear to me, but he might have had a good reason, and the language is flexible enough so it really doesn't matter very much. Maybe because SVO is the most common pattern in human languages. I would have preferred that lojban follow the predicate logic form where the predicate is initial (or equivalently, terminal). If you want, you can put the predicate at the beginning, at the cost of a fi. (Sorry, thats the best pun I can manage with my limited lojban) I was under the impression that SVO *was* important in the Sapir-Whorf sense. One of my linguistics professors in college gave the example of German, where the listener sits around until the end of the sentence waiting for the meaning to become clear. I don't know German, and don't remember the example she gave, but I thought it had to do with SVO in English vs. other arrangements in spoken German. -Steven Steven Belknap, M.D. Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria