[lojban-beginners] Place structure vs. grammatical morphemes

[mashers <mail@mashley.net>]

coi ro do! I'm a newbie to Lojban and am just learning the basics of the grammar. The regular structure of the language really appeals to me, but I have one question. Please could somebody explain to me the advantage of place structure compared to grammatical morphemes which exist in other languages? Take the example of 'klama'. In order to understand {mi klama le zdani le panka}, I have to know that x1 of klama is the person travelling, x2 is the destination and x3 is the source. This means, as a learner, that I have to learn not only that 'llama' expresses the concept I label in English using 'come', 'go' or 'travel', I also have to learn the place structure. This is five additional pieces of information (in the case of klama). Another learner, who may also have an infirm grasp of Lojban vocabulary, may mistake the place structure of the brivla. They might think x2 is the source and x3 is the destination, meaning they misunderstand the communication.

So my question is, why is it better to have place structure files by sumti (and assume that listeners know the place structure for the brivlas you are using) than it is to just use grammatical morphemes? In this example, the English prepositions 'to' and 'from' tell the listener unambiguously that the following noun [phrase] represents the destination and source of the journey respectively.

Although this does not dampen my enthusiasm for Lojban, I would be interested to hear others' thoughts on this.

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