From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:58:29 2010 Reply-To: Ivan A Derzhanski Sender: Lojban list Date: Tue Dec 17 10:14:01 1996 From: Ivan A Derzhanski Organization: Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science Subject: Re: lojban imperfections? To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu X-UIDL: 9135198c0492da905d6b4ce1cb4a0b23 X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2406 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Dec 17 10:14:01 1996 X-From-Space-Address: - Message-ID: My BGL10's worth regarding word order-- In natural languages it actually tends to be determined by the complex interaction of several systems, to wit: * semantic relations (agent, patient, goal, ...), * syntactic functions (subject, object, adjunct, ...), * discourse structure (topic, focus, comment, ...), as well as anything else that may turn out to be relevant in some particular language (animacy/activeness hierarchies come to mind). In Turkish the subject comes first, whereas the object precedes the verb, which comes last. In Kabardian the more active argument comes before the less active one. (`Activeness' depends on such things as animacy and specificity.) Since subjects are usually more active than objects, both languages are put down as SOV, which misses the point that the motivation for that basic order is not the same. That's why the classical classification of languages as VSO vs SVO vs SOV etc. is potentially dangerous. Now in Lojban discourse functions are marked by attitudinals and prenexes, semantic ro^les are not consistently related to argument structure, and concepts such as `subject' and `object' are only useful with a huge lump of salt (which is how it should be, since they are not universal in the first place). Nevertheless, in so far as we accept the basic order counts (with a due amount of scepticism), it has been established that the two orders SVO and SOV are about equally frequent, each of them being far more common than VSO, which in turn is much better attested than all the OS orders put together. All of which is reflected admirably well in Lojban, where the closest counterparts of SVO and SOV are both equally straightforward, VSO is available at the cost of a fi and VOS, OVS and OSV at the cost of more than one fi. As for why most of the Lojban utterances generated to date are predicate-medial rather than predicate-final, well, that may have something to do with the [native English speaker]hood of most of the present population of Lojbanistan; but no one has to follow suit. -- "mIw'e' lo'lu'ta'bogh batlh tlhIHvaD vIlIH [...] poH vIghajchugh neH jIH, yab boghajchugh neH tlhIH" (Lewis Carroll, "_Snark_ wamlu'") Ivan A Derzhanski Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences Home: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria