From jcowan@reutershealth.com Mon Oct 18 13:16:41 2004 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 1561 invoked from network); 18 Oct 2004 20:16:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.166) by m16.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 18 Oct 2004 20:16:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ratanakiri.reutershealth.com) (65.246.141.37) by mta5.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 18 Oct 2004 20:16:35 -0000 Received: from skunk.reutershealth.com (mail [65.246.141.36]) by ratanakiri.reutershealth.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with SMTP id i9IKEORC008188; Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:14:25 -0400 (EDT) Received: by skunk.reutershealth.com (sSMTP sendmail emulation); Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:16:40 -0400 Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:16:40 -0400 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Cc: Hedy Bos Message-ID: <20041018201640.GA9333@skunk.reutershealth.com> References: <20041018165014.GI22470@chain.digitalkingdom.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20041018165014.GI22470@chain.digitalkingdom.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i X-eGroups-Remote-IP: 65.246.141.37 From: John Cowan Subject: Re: [lojban] [hedybos@hotmail.com: Feedback (long, sorry)))] X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=8122456 X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 23157 Robin Lee Powell scripsit: > I am not anywhere near enough of a linguist to handle this. I'll tackle it. Hedy Bos scripsit: > -The denotation is hell. A period expressing a phoneme? Why? And > what?s with the phobia for the symbol ?h?? If your defence is ?it is > used only to separate vowels?, then there still would be no reason > why the symbol ?h? could n?t be used. Morphologically the aspirate is neither a vowel nor a consonant, and neither is the glottal stop, so we avoid symbols associated with vowels and consonants for them. The symbols we use are readily available on typewriter keyboards and in handwriting. > I don?t think Lojban needs to specify everthing in such a frantic > way. It?s logical, people can think for themselves. Common people > have no use for such specifications as mentioned in the section about > deictics. They will not use such forms. There is no one feature in Lojban, as far as we know, that is not found in some natural language. In addition, the notion that "common people won't" do this or that flies in the face of the evidence. Languages are learned by nonspecialists (we are all nonspecialists when we are children), and some of them make far more complicated distinctions than Lojban does -- and many such distinctions are mandatory, whereas in Lojban almost everything is optional. > -the assumption that natural languages are inadequate aggravates me. Inadequate for certain purposes, not for every purpose. If they were really adequate for all purposes, mathematics would never have been invented. > I am convinced that if something does not occur in a natural language > this must be for a (simple) reason: it doesn?t work! If the invading Bantu speakers had annihilated the Khoi-San speakers before Europeans met them, instead of just confining them to the area around the Cape of Good Hope, we'd probably be convinced today that clicks "didn't work" in natural languages. In any case, if you want a natural language, you know where to find 6,000 of them. > -why so many arguments for one stem? Why not express these with > prepositions? Rather than constructing another ad hoc pile of prepositions to go along with the ad hoc pile of predicates that all languages have, Lojban constructs its prepositions directly from its predicates. So rather than supplementing a simple verb "to come/go" with prepositions indicating origin and destination, the prepositions of origin and destination are constructed from the verb "to come/go". > -why use separate stems for compounding? It does make the entire > utterance shorter, but it also increases the number of forms to > be learned. The bound morphemes (rafsi) are an awkward compromise, admittedly. They are an attempt to ensure two separate kinds of unambiguity simultaneously: that sentences can be unambiguously divided into words, and that words can be unambiguously divided into morphemes. Thus, given two consecutive morphemes, it must be possible to tell whether they are in two separate words or not. To make this possible, we provide separate bound and free forms for all morphemes except structure words. The alternative would be to create a word-delimiting morpheme, which would be far more unnatural. > By the way: how does one derive causative forms, stative forms etc.? > Are they derived from the same root or do they have separate forms? I > think the first option would be more logical. Causative forms are compounded using the four Lojban causal predicates. Stative forms are made by simple ellipsis, as in Lojban there are no required arguments. -- LEAR: Dost thou call me fool, boy? John Cowan FOOL: All thy other titles http://www.ccil.org/~cowan thou hast given away: jcowan@reutershealth.com That thou wast born with. http://www.reutershealth.com