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[lojban-beginners] Re: questions about lojban



On Monday, May 20, 2013 9:42:57 PM UTC+4, tjerk wrote:
I'm interested in lojban. I hope to state complicated meanings very clearly using lojban,
and without the need for further clarifications as is common in natural languages.

A son of mine has dyslexia, and I read that languages in which each letter can only
be pronounced in one way is much easier for dyslectics to read. Sounds very plausible.
Finnish could help then. But lojban also. Further, language is really his thing. He began
to speak very young and he makes quite complicated grammatical constructions. And generally
knows the effect on meaning changing places of words have. lojban could help him to
transfer his ability in spoken language to written language. And I hope we can have some
fun together learning it.

So far for my motivation. I have some questions and remarks about lojban.

1.
'mi' in lojban means I and also we. So, here lojban is more ambiguous than english. But
lojban is supposed to be less ambiguous than english. Lojban has another 3 words for we,
meaning: me and you, you and others, me and others and not you. So 'mi' could have been
reserved for I without losing expressiveness.
I suppose this thing of lojban is because lojban leaves number open by default. 'le karci'
means the car or the cars. Does 'le pa karci' mean the car and only that, so not the cars?
If so, does 'pa mi' mean I and not we?
Why is there no article in lojban that means exactly one of something?
2.
Tense is also open by default in lojban. So 'mi klama le zarci' can mean I go to the market,
and it can mean I went to the market, and it can mean I will go the market. So this is again
more ambiguous than english. Of course there are words to specify the time, but why is
present tense not the default? Minimizing guessing using context is one of the main goals of
lojban, not?

Well, the fact is that many languages have no default tense or number.
Lojban fully follows the principle of facultative precision: the fewer words you say, the more vague your speech becomes.
Languages that are very precise are probably impossible to speak. Nobody needs a language that forces you to always pay attention to tiny details.
E.g. speakers of Chinese often wonder why English burdens the speakers with so many tiny details that you *HAVE* to express:

I've been going to the market.
I will have gone to the market

...
and so on.

So no, minimising guessing is not the goal of lojban or any sane language.
What is really powerful in Lojban is that you MAY (in accordance with your desire) increase or decrease the precision of your speech to the level that you need exactly in this case.

In Chinese there is no default tense and most of the time Chinese speakers use no tense at all! A billion people speak this and find no problems!
But if you want to talk like in English you may add additional markers:
ca = present tense
ca'o = continuous
ba'o = perfect
and so on.

Now look at the sentence: "In this picture the author has shown how three girls are going to the library". Now in what tense should we put the verb "to go"?
When they were going to the library? At the moment when the author drew the picture. At the moment when the author had watch real girls in real world going to the library? Or may be they are going when *you* are watching the picture?
In fact making "present" the default tense here would be incorrect.

As for numbers

a. You can say that {karce} is a verb that means "to be a car".
b. Then {le} or {lo} transforms this verb into a noun.
c. Next you add a number and specify the number using e.g. {pa}: {lo pa karce} = one car.

Actually Chinese has no numbers by default!
Of course as Lojban is a universal language it is able to reflect features of other languages. Isn't that great?

The same for {mi}. If you have an alternating personality what would you describe yourself? Is it {pa mi} or {za'u mi} (i.e. in plural)?
Isn't it better just to say {mi}? So such vague meaning of mi is highly useful and can be made more precise on demand using additional words.


3.
In lojban the predicate(selbri) can be put everywhere in a sentence, except at the best
place, the begin. That is the normal place for a function. And a selbri is a kind of
function. 'fa' has to be used to be able to put the selbri at the begin: klama fa mi le
zarci. Maybe another cmavo also works.
Where did it go wrong? Trying to resemble the SVO structure of english?

Yes,  trying to resemble the structure of most spoken languages in the world including English and Chinese.
However, if the language that you love has VSO or any other structure you are welcome to always use FA.


4.
The main effect the place structure grammar of lojban seems to have is elimination of
prepositions. I have my doubts about this. For example, compare 'I go to the market' and 'I
talk to you'. Very different things are happening, but there is also similarity. There is
a destination in both, and that is why to is used in both cases.

Yes, there is similarity  but in *English*.  E.g. in Russian instead of "talk to somebody" we say "talk with somebody".
So which language should we try to emulate? Isn't it better to translate the meaning of the text and not individual words?

However, there is indeed similarity between those two meanings of the word "to".
This is a metaphor. Talk is about transmitting information in words.
Going is about moving physical objects like your own body.

You can talk metaphorically in lojban to reproduce features of specific languages.
In this case you might want to use {fa'a} (towards) of {ka'a} of {tebe'i}. Also  you would probably want to add {pe'a} maker to indicte that the sentence is metaphorical.


In the place structure grammar of lojban a place has no meaning on its own (although 1st
place is maybe always the subject). If a predicate has an argument for some sort of
destination you have to look up its place for the predicate, and also remember that place.
Remembering a preposition for notating destination for each predicate seems simpler.

Given that such prepositions are rather arbitrary in different language it might appear to be even harder.


mu'o

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