[lojban] Re: Lojban Vs. Esperanto

["c1tk" <tk1@despammed.com>]

Hello all,

[Craig:]

> Essentially, what this means for you is that you cannot do research
> about
> planned languages by grouping Lojban and Esperanto in the same
> category. Of

While this is true, however both _are_ artificial languages meant for
human-to-human communication, so we can still try to compare their
features, and reason about their ease of learning in various cases,
their degree of cultural neutrality, etc.

I believe Myriam was looking for some first-hand information, rather
than something that can be found in some Lojban or Esperanto blurb.
As someone with a mathematical background, I can say I like Lojban's
attempt at formal rigour (even if it has not succeeded).
                                                       
It is claimed that Lojban is "based on predicate logic". However,
this claim is not very meaningful, since every language has some 
predicate formula structure -- a natural language sentence can often
be analyzed into a predicate ("verb") with lots of arguments hanging
from it ("nouns", possibly with "prepositions"), where sometimes
one argument may be related by another predicate to other arguments,
etc.
                                                       
I think a difference between Lojban, Esperanto and other languages
lies in how they tell which arguments correspond to which `role'
(argument place) in the predicate formula: e.g. given 3 words
"killed", "who had", "John", "the man", "the knife", who killed
whom, and who had the knife?
                                                       
From what I read, Esperanto uses 2 forms of nouns, the nominative
("subject") and accusative ("object"), allowing the 2 nouns and the
verb to be arranged in any order -- but this potentially causes
problems when the "object" of one relation turns out to be the
"subject" of another relation, in the case "John killed the man
who had the knife". In this case the only relief seems to be to fall
back on the conventions of Indo-European grammar, but I may be wrong
here.

Lojban, works around the above problem by supplying constructs to
attach an extra role to the main predicate ("killed") or an extra
predicate to an argument ("John"/"the man"), so that the precise
relationship is clear. This price to be paid, however, is increased
verbosity. Also, Lojban has a somewhat less flexible word order --
which argument belongs to which role is determined by where each
argument appears in a clause.

There is a lot more that can be said about Lojban, but I guess this
is enough for now.



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