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Date: Mon, 20 May 2013 23:40:48 +0200
From: v4hn <me@v4hn.de>
To: lojban-beginners@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban-beginners] questions about lojban
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 Content preview:  Hey tjerk, On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 10:42:57AM -0700, tjerk
    wrote: > A son of mine has dyslexia, and I read that languages in which each
    letter > can only > be pronounced in one way is much easier for dyslectics
    to read. Sounds very > plausible. > Finnish could help then. But lojban also.
    [...] 
 
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Hey tjerk,

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 10:42:57AM -0700, tjerk wrote:
> A son of mine has dyslexia, and I read that languages in which each lette=
r=20
> can only
> be pronounced in one way is much easier for dyslectics to read. Sounds ve=
ry=20
> plausible.
> Finnish could help then. But lojban also.

Hm, I'm actually not sure lojban is of much help here.
Yes, audio-visual isomorphism makes reading more easy, but due
to the structure of lojban's gismu (exactly five letters including two vowe=
ls)
there are a lot of gismu which look very similar but mean entirely different
things, like dasni/dasri, festi/fetsi, ...
That again can make it much harder to read lojban.

> Does 'le pa karci' mean the car and only that, so not the cars?

{pa le karci} or {pa karci} (if a number preceeds the bridi you don't neces=
sarily
need an article, you can think about this as {pa lo karci}) can be used for=
 that,
an inner quantifier is not needed here.

> Why is there no article in lojban that means exactly one of something?

Because you normally don't need it. If you do, just add the number specific=
ally.

> 2.
> Tense is also open by default in lojban. So 'mi klama le zarci' can mean =
I=20
> go to the market,
> and it can mean I went to the market, and it can mean I will go the marke=
t.=20
> So this is again
> more ambiguous than english. Of course there are words to specify the tim=
e,=20
> but why is present tense not the default?

Because you talk about the present much less often than you think you do.
English present tense is used for much more than statements about the curre=
nt
state of the world.

> Minimizing guessing using context is one of=20
> the main goals of
> lojban, not?

Hm, lojban actually leaves quite a lot up to context. But that is not really
a bad thing. If context already gives away the sumti of e.g. {catra},
why bother to name them? If you explicitly want to override context, you
can about always use few words to do that. That's much harder in many natur=
al languages.

> 3.
> In lojban the predicate(selbri) can be put everywhere in a sentence, exce=
pt=20
> at the best
> place, the begin. That is the normal place for a function. And a selbri i=
s=20
> a kind of
> function. 'fa' has to be used to be able to put the selbri at the begin:=
=20
> klama fa mi le
> zarci. Maybe another cmavo also works.=20
> Where did it go wrong? Trying to resemble the SVO structure of english?

There is no "normal place of a function", just mathematical convention.
If you prefer reverse polish notation, they belong in the end.
The functions themself don't care at all. Talking about programming:
object methods usually follow their object "object.method()". W.r.t. this
usage lojban is quite natural. .u'i

Arguably, human languages most often involve talking about objects which are
topics of discourse. That is, I talk about _something_ doing something.
That can be the first thing to mention in a sentence and the way lojban doe=
s it
(if you don't use {fa} to change that)

> 4.
> The main effect the place structure grammar of lojban seems to have is=20
> elimination of
> prepositions. I have my doubts about this. For example, compare 'I go to=
=20
> the market' and 'I
> talk to you'. Very different things are happening, but there is also=20
> similarity. There is
> a destination in both, and that is why to is used in both cases.

There is a whole class/selma'o BAI which provide something more flexible
than prepositions:=20

For example you can use {zau} to say {mi klama le zarci zau le patfu}:

I go to the market and-that-was-approved-by the father.

{seka'a} provides the first meaning of "to" in your example, {tecu'u} the s=
econd.
However, the bridi structure normally provides most "slots" you need
to make your utterance, so you don't have to use BAIs all of the time.
You can though, if you prefer them to extensive place structure usage
(Not everyone remembers the x4 of {mluni} for example).


mi'e la .van. mu'o

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