From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Tue May 09 01:19:11 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 20903 invoked from network); 9 May 2000 08:19:10 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 9 May 2000 08:19:10 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO argo.bas.bg) (195.96.224.7) by mta1 with SMTP; 9 May 2000 08:19:07 -0000 Received: from banmatpc.math.bas.bg (root@banmatpc.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.2]) by argo.bas.bg (8.10.1/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-6) with ESMTP id e498Ix926154 for ; Tue, 9 May 2000 11:18:59 +0300 Received: from iad.math.bas.bg (iad.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.88]) by banmatpc.math.bas.bg (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id LAA20110 for ; Tue, 9 May 2000 11:18:58 +0300 Message-ID: <3917CA1B.59FA@math.bas.bg> Date: Tue, 09 May 2000 11:19:39 +0300 Reply-To: iad@math.bas.bg Organization: Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Win95; I; 16bit) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: The Lojban List Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page References: <64.2813af7.26485ec9@aol.com> <4.2.2.20000508172700.00abe400@127.0.0.1> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 2615 Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote: > At 07:27 PM 05/08/2000 +0000, PILCH Hartmut wrote: > >There are other examples of silly centrifugal order in German, > >e.g. "S 828 BGB", which is just an abbreviation for something > >like "Section 828 of the Civil Law". "S 828 BGB" actually looks extremely unGerman: if there is anything that the German language (and in particular its scholarly style) are notorious for, it is their long centripetal compounds that Mark Twain had such a hard time with. > >Nobody can argue that it suits human thinking well to first > >dive down into a section and then look up and see what body > >of law we are talking about. Certainly not. Otoh, that form can be handy if the hearer is very likely to already know which body of law is being talked about. Which is just the case with dates of {lo zi fasnu}. > >There is no deeper meaning to these language conventions. > >They are just habits that evolved out of the language's grammer pattern > >and were never questioned, no matter how unpractical the results were. Here is another illustration of the influence of grammar patterns: The so-called `descriptive notation' for chess is known both in English- and Spanish-speaking countries, but what is `QB3' in English (`Queen's Bishop's third square') is "3AD" in Spanish ("cuadro tres del alfil (del lado) de la dama"). > I agree that they probably evolved out of the language's grammar pattern, > but you persist is seeing tanru as the more basic grammar pattern of > Lojban, and dates as being tanru, whereas the basic unambiguous structure > is the restrictive clause/phrase, or the added specified place on a > predicate [...]. Both of these tend to be added to the end in Lojban [...]. That may be because of the structural difference between tanru and phrases containing restrictive clauses: in the former the components are simply juxtaposed, whereas the latter employ special connectives. Since what cmavo (in lojban) or punctuation (elsewhere) appears between the numbers in dates serves only to separate them, they do end up looking more like tanru. That is, `05/09' looks more like `gold ring' than `ring of gold', because the slash is more like a space than like the preposition `of' -- all it does is separate the digits. Which does not prevent it from being interpreted as `9 May', and that in turn as `the 9th of May', by anyone in Europe. There is no need for dates to pattern after the grammar of anything else in the language. --Ivan