From sentto-44114-20401-1058467818-lojban-in=lojban.org@returns.groups.yahoo.com Thu Jul 17 11:50:58 2003 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:50:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from n25.grp.scd.yahoo.com ([66.218.66.81]) by digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.12) id 19dDq7-0005Sh-00 for lojban-in@lojban.org; Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:50:51 -0700 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-44114-20401-1058467818-lojban-in=lojban.org@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.66.157] by n25.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 17 Jul 2003 18:50:19 -0000 X-Sender: tk1@despammed.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 58320 invoked from network); 17 Jul 2003 18:50:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m17.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 17 Jul 2003 18:50:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO n9.grp.scd.yahoo.com) (66.218.66.93) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 17 Jul 2003 18:50:18 -0000 Received: from [66.218.67.130] by n9.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 17 Jul 2003 18:50:18 -0000 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Message-ID: In-Reply-To: User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster From: "c1tk" X-Originating-IP: 165.21.154.9 X-Yahoo-Profile: c1tk MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list lojban@yahoogroups.com; contact lojban-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list lojban@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 18:50:16 -0000 Subject: [lojban] Re: Lojban Vs. Esperanto Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-archive-position: 5897 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: tk1@despammed.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list Hello all, [Craig:] > Essentially, what this means for you is that you cannot do research > about > planned languages by grouping Lojban and Esperanto in the same > category. Of While this is true, however both _are_ artificial languages meant for human-to-human communication, so we can still try to compare their features, and reason about their ease of learning in various cases, their degree of cultural neutrality, etc. I believe Myriam was looking for some first-hand information, rather than something that can be found in some Lojban or Esperanto blurb. As someone with a mathematical background, I can say I like Lojban's attempt at formal rigour (even if it has not succeeded). It is claimed that Lojban is "based on predicate logic". However, this claim is not very meaningful, since every language has some predicate formula structure -- a natural language sentence can often be analyzed into a predicate ("verb") with lots of arguments hanging from it ("nouns", possibly with "prepositions"), where sometimes one argument may be related by another predicate to other arguments, etc. I think a difference between Lojban, Esperanto and other languages lies in how they tell which arguments correspond to which `role' (argument place) in the predicate formula: e.g. given 3 words "killed", "who had", "John", "the man", "the knife", who killed whom, and who had the knife? From what I read, Esperanto uses 2 forms of nouns, the nominative ("subject") and accusative ("object"), allowing the 2 nouns and the verb to be arranged in any order -- but this potentially causes problems when the "object" of one relation turns out to be the "subject" of another relation, in the case "John killed the man who had the knife". In this case the only relief seems to be to fall back on the conventions of Indo-European grammar, but I may be wrong here. Lojban, works around the above problem by supplying constructs to attach an extra role to the main predicate ("killed") or an extra predicate to an argument ("John"/"the man"), so that the precise relationship is clear. This price to be paid, however, is increased verbosity. Also, Lojban has a somewhat less flexible word order -- which argument belongs to which role is determined by where each argument appears in a clause. There is a lot more that can be said about Lojban, but I guess this is enough for now. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Free shipping on all inkjet cartridge & refill kit orders to US & Canada. Low prices up to 80% off. We have your brand: HP, Epson, Lexmark & more. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5510 http://us.click.yahoo.com/GHXcIA/n.WGAA/ySSFAA/GSaulB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/