On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 9:18 AM, mashers
<mail@mashley.net> wrote:
On Sunday, 14 October 2012 12:22:20 UTC+1, gleki wrote:
I don't understand. If English "to" has multiple meanings then why should Lojban be polysemous just like English?
It absolutely shouldn't. One the most appealing features of Lojban to me is that each symbol has only one meaning. My point was not that a symbol should represent multiple meanings.
But if you want one morpheme for one meaning of English "to" this is how Lojban already works
But the morphemes aren't spoken, they are implied by the place structure. How does this work in practice if a novice has limited knowledge of the brivla place structures? And doesn't having to learn the place structure for each brivla add more learning load?
Yes, there is a learning load, but as Lindar points out, there is much regularity, too. But I just want to say that perhaps you don't realize that English has exactly same type of place structure load. Unlike, for example, Latin, where the function of a word in a sentence is communicated by word endings or Hebrew which has a direct object indicator, so that word order isn't as importnat, English says things like "John gives Jane the ball". The role of" John", "Jane", and "the ball" are entirely based on their position in the sentence, so are implicitly as much a part of "give' as they are of "dunda". Lojban just makes these relationships explicit. And as someone else pointed out, by loading up brivla with several places, that means you are also learning the equivalent of many words for the price of one. Want to learn how to say the equivalent of the English "giver", "gift", "receiver"? Learn just one word "dunda".
--gejyspa