Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 09:09:31 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711011409.JAA01344@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Robin Turner Sender: Lojban list From: Robin Turner Subject: terminators and bilingualism X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1432 Lines: 26 I stand corrected on "yinwei/suoyi" - I only studied Chinese for a year, and that was 16 years ago! As for postpositional languages, I'm not sure whether a postposition counts as a terminator or not. It certainly would if it marked, say, the end of a relative clause, but I'm not so sure about simple case markers. A language which used pre- and post-positions at the same time would certainly qualify, though. The problem is that as far as I can see, whenever a language has a grammatical word before and after a phrase, one of the pair is nearly always elidable. The problem with Lojban is that elision is not always an option. However, there may be an argument that terminators exist in Universal Grammar (if UG actually exists, that is), since it is common to express them, not only by punctuation, but by pauses in speech (now there's a research area for someone). As for children learning Lojban, there is no need to lock them up in a cellar! Bilingualism is very common in children of mixed marriages, and while they sometimes mix up lexis, they always seem to follow the grammatical rules of whichever language they are speaking at the time. An example from a Turkish/English household:- (English) Parent: Bak! [Turkish imperative "look"] 4-year-old child: I'm backing, I'm backing! The problem would be finding a Lojbanist rirni who could be bothered to spend enough time speaking Lojban to their cifnu! Robin