From pycyn@aol.com Sat May 20 10:23:28 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 20766 invoked from network); 20 May 2000 17:23:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 20 May 2000 17:23:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r18.mail.aol.com) (152.163.225.72) by mta3 with SMTP; 20 May 2000 17:23:26 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r18.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.9.) id a.b8.5f76f5f (3986) for ; Sat, 20 May 2000 13:23:09 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 13:23:08 EDT Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: place structure. To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 2778 In a message dated 00-05-19 13:01:16 EDT, you write: << On the other hand, in Lojban there are many more sumti tcita than in Loglan, such as ga'a (zgana, as observed by) or mu'u (mupli, for example), a total of 64 of them according to my notes, in addition to the tenses . They are etymologically and semantically closely related to particular gismu, and the effect of tagging a bridi with one of these prepositional phrases is pretty easy to predict regardless of the selbri (predicate) in the bridi. In addition, fi'o...[fe'u] allows any selbri to be used in a -type phrase. This is in contrast to natural languages where the meaning of the predefined cases (genitive, dative, ablative, etc.) has just enough regularity to confuse the learner, who ought to be just memorizing their use with each predicate individually. From time to time in the past, the fashion has shifted between giving numbered places to "all" "essential" arguments of a gismu, versus letting the more outre' arguments be served by phrases. At the time of baselining the pendulum was stuck on the side that is not my favorite. Of course, the speaker is not required to use numbered places if his judgement of style suggests that a phrase would be better. >> Well, some would prefer fewer places ("under condition" seems to turn up a lot at the end of lists, say), other would prefer more. The point here is that the BAI list works so well just because it is based in the predicates and so has a thoroughly fixed meaning that can be learned without much extra effort, as opposed to the minimal-place predicates and prepositions or cases or whatever, where the meanings of the latter have already to be learned anew with each predicate. The altter seems to be less efficient in even the short run