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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