[lojban-beginners] Re: Everyone should speak lojban?

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

--- Matt Arnold wrote:
> The mis-information was on one point-- namely, whether cmavo is its own class
> of word. Cmavo is not one kind of word, for the same reason that
> miscellaneous is not a true category. I can understand Tasci's confusion.
> Morphology alone is not what one expects when looking for a class of words
> that share signifigant things in common. This is not a criticism of Lojban,
> but merely needs to be emphasized to learners.

Indeed. Lojban material is sometimes confusing with respect to 
this. For example, CLL says:

"Lojban has three basic word classes --- parts of speech --- in 
contrast to the eight that are traditional in English. These three 
classes are called cmavo, brivla, and cmene."

But that's not really true. These *morphological* word classes
of Lojban cannot be compared with the eight word classes
that are traditional in English. If "the" and "because"
belong to different classes in English, by any analogous
criterion "lo" and "ki'u" must belong to different classes 
in Lojban too. In fact, the eight classes of English 
correspond to some 120 classes in Lojban (although many 
of the Lojban classes are very similar and could eventually 
be merged, and many are never or so rarely used that they 
could be ignored). The difference is that the classes in
Lojan are very well delimited, whereas in English there 
are subclasses of the main classes, because not all words
in a given class can always be used interchangeably in a
given syntactic context.

mu'o mi'e xorxes



		
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