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Re: [lojban-beginners] questions about lojban



Op maandag 20 mei 2013 23:40:48 UTC+2 schreef v4hn het volgende:
Hey tjerk,

Hi v4hn
 

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 10:42:57AM -0700, tjerk wrote:
> 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.

Hm, I'm actually not sure lojban is of much help here.
Yes, audio-visual isomorphism makes reading more easy, but due
to the structure of lojban's gismu (exactly five letters including two vowels)
there are a lot of gismu which look very similar but mean entirely different
things, like dasni/dasri, festi/fetsi, ...
That again can make it much harder to read lojban.

The finnish language (Finland) has audio-visual isomorphism. I read that there are almost no dyslectics in Finland, because of this. I suppose finnish too has words that look alike.
English is worst in mapping text to sound. And that is the explanation for that the USA and the UK have to highest percentages of dyslectics. Dutch, my native language, is somewhere in between.

But I don't really know all this, it just sounds plausible to me. In lojban you can move your eyes from the left to the right and in the same rythm and speed as the letters appear speak.
   
 

> Does 'le pa karci' mean the car and only that, so not the cars?

{pa le karci} or {pa karci} (if a number preceeds the bridi you don't necessarily
need an article, you can think about this as {pa lo karci}) can be used for that,
an inner quantifier is not needed here.

> Why is there no article in lojban that means exactly one of something?

Because you normally don't need it. If you do, just add the number specifically.

> 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?

Because you talk about the present much less often than you think you do.
English present tense is used for much more than statements about the current
state of the world.

> Minimizing guessing using context is one of
> the main goals of
> lojban, not?

Hm, lojban actually leaves quite a lot up to context. But that is not really
a bad thing. If context already gives away the sumti of e.g. {catra},
why bother to name them? If you explicitly want to override context, you
can about always use few words to do that. That's much harder in many natural languages.

> 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?

There is no "normal place of a function", just mathematical convention.
If you prefer reverse polish notation, they belong in the end.

In the end is not handy compared to at the begin. When you first read the predicate, after that you can then map each argument to its meaning in the sentence immediately when you read that argument.

When the predicate comes last, you have to keep a mental book keeping of all the arguments, the positions or order, first, and only when, at last, you read the predicate, then you can map to their meaning in the sentence. It takes more mental resources.
 
The functions themself don't care at all. Talking about programming:
object methods usually follow their object "object.method()". W.r.t. this
usage lojban is quite natural. .u'i

Lojban resembles functional programming more than object oriented programming. The predicate is central, and that is a function.

A language that would resemble object oriented programming more, would put nouns central. Part of the definition of a noun would be the possible predicate relations it could have (methods). It would have a taxonomy of its nouns (inheritance relations). 
 

Arguably, human languages most often involve talking about objects which are
topics of discourse. That is, I talk about _something_ doing something.
That can be the first thing to mention in a sentence and the way lojban does it
(if you don't use {fa} to change that)

> 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.

There is a whole class/selma'o BAI which provide something more flexible
than prepositions:

Nice.
 

For example you can use {zau} to say {mi klama le zarci zau le patfu}:

I go to the market and-that-was-approved-by the father.

{seka'a} provides the first meaning of "to" in your example, {tecu'u} the second.
However, the bridi structure normally provides most "slots" you need
to make your utterance, so you don't have to use BAIs all of the time.
You can though, if you prefer them to extensive place structure usage
(Not everyone remembers the x4 of {mluni} for example).


mi'e la .van. mu'o

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