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[lojban-beginners] Re: some questions
On Saturday 20 October 2007 09:57, Matt Arnold wrote:
> On 10/20/07, Jared Angell <angell.jared@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Why is it that it is so difficult to translate texts into Lojban? My
> > understanding is that it is...
>
> Because Lojban is extremely alien. It's grammatical concepts and
> structures have never existed in any naturally-occurring language.
Actually I think it's rather that Lojban doesn't have much vocabulary. If I
wanted to translate an article about cement (the kind that is used to make
concrete) into Lojban, I'd have to make up words for "calcium
silicate", "alite", and "belite". We have words for "calcium" (bogjinme)
and "silicon" (cancmu), but not "-ate". "Alite" and "belite", words I didn't
know a few days ago, appear to be named for letters of the alphabet, but I
don't know for sure, and I don't know what words to use for them in Lojban.
If I wanted to translate the article into Spanish, I'd just have to find out
what someone else has already called them.
The basic grammar doesn't seem any more alien to me than, say, Cree or Ojibwe.
(They are related, so what goes for one probably goes for the other.) Cree,
like Lojban, doesn't have adjectives, and Ojibwe has preverbs, prenouns,
postverbs, and postnouns, which are apparently run together to make words
that combine both verbs and nouns together. (I've seen some Wiktionary
entries, but I haven't studied the language.) Lojban, instead of the
accusative or ergative alignment that most languages have, has an
indefinitely long string of numbered places. That is no stranger to me, both
of whose native languages are accusative, than ergative is, and no harder to
learn the order of places than to learn the various uses of prepositions in
natural languages.
Pierre