On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 6:33 PM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
Some concepts correspond; others correspond only roughly; others don't correspond at all. This applies to almost any dissimilar pair of languages.
In the case of the Lojban-English pairing, I'd say most things fall into the second category. For example, the notion of a "selbri" isn't that far from the notion of an English "verb", with the main distinction being that in English words are verbs, while in Lojban words (and phrases) act as selbri, in addition to doing other things. The same applies to sumti/nouns. Similarly, place structure up to 2 places is essentially how English works. That is, transitive verbs are "two place selbri" and intransitive verbs are "one place selbri". English, unlike Lojban, creates most of its more complicated relationships using prepositions and multiple clauses; the main counterexample I can think of is "give", such as "I give the boy the box."
"I to the boy give the box.", "I give the box to the boy.", "To the boy I give the box.", "The box I give to the boy.".
Most usages of "give" involve "to" to identify the recipient if it's not in the usual place, and of course the giver is pretty much always immediately before, and always at least before, "give'.
For this reason I think the best way to learn Lojban as an English speaker (and probably as a speaker of most languages) is to learn how the pure Lojban terms are similar to and different from their approximate English counterparts, and then use those as you study and discuss the language.
mu'o mi'e la latro'a .i .a'o mi sidju ta'i lo nu cusku de'u
after any of you give Lojban examples, could you guys translate them into English? I don't know a whole lot of Lojban. This really is the right place for me. By the way, about not comparing English with Lojban, how else am I supposed to understand the concepts if I don't compare with something?
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