[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban-beginners Digest V6 #30

[der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>]

> I would argue that there are adjectives and adverbs in Lojban, at
> least in the traditional linguistic sense.  When I say {le xekri
> mlatu} for "the black cat", {mlatu} is a noun and {xekri} is
> modifying it - making it an adjective.

I call malglico.  Neither of those gismu has either of those types.
{xekri} is functioning here as an adjective, but to think of it as an
adjective because it can work that way strikes me as an error; it is
just as *gramatically* sensible to say {le xekri mlatu} as {le mlatu
xekri} - though admittedly the latter means something less likely to be
intended (and is more complicated to gloss into English, because
English *does* have nouns and adjectives and verbs, and thus demands
the use of placeholders like "thing" and converters like "-like" or
"-ish").  And {mlatu} does not become a "noun" until it's under the
influence of {le}; I'd say it would be closer to accurate to say that
{le ... mlatu} is a noun.  (If you still think {mlatu} qua {mlatu} is a
noun, consider {mi mlatu}.)

Quite aside from the mistake of assigning English parts of speech to
gismu as such, I think that calling a relation expressor - a gismu, for
example - a "verb" is malglico in another way, too: it is confusing two
distinct concepts because each is the nearest thing available in its
language to the other.  Relationships expressed in English always
involve verbs, but that's because the structure of English compels it;
there is no more inherent need to have a verbal in something like "is a
cat" than there is to have a subject in "it is raining".  "Is a cat" is
the closest English gloss to {mlatu} in many of its uses, but "catness"
is another plausible one.

This is one reason I find lojban so fascinating: it exposes a layer of
Sapir-Whorf-ness I'd never been aware of before.

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