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Re: [lojban] Some remarks from a beginner

Others have answered in part, but let me add to the answers.

At 09:36 AM 01/12/2001 -0500, fchauvet@aol.com wrote:

1) The idea of "place structure" is indeed a good one. But, e.g. in Latin,
most of the
litterature uses case-endings to emphasize some parts of a sentence (ifyou
can read
Latin, see Virgil or Cicero). This is not possible in Lojban without using
place permutators
(suvh as "te", "ve"...).
The words of selma'o BAI, several dozen of them, act somewhat as case-endings do in Romance languages, but are optional and almost never used for the standard places. As others have noted, there are several ways to rearrange the places of a predicate. 


You can argue that these particles are indeed
equivalent to case
endings (after all, Swahili puts its flexions on the beginning of words). How
can you keep
a "natural" structure? I mean, "focus" first, then the other parameters?
Focus first is not the only "natural" order, just the one common in European languages. A (uniquely?) Lojbanic way of expressing focus is the prenex, wherein you can identify the focus sumti, which then occurs whereever it may fall. This would be equivalent to the English "As to the market, John went to the market." where "the market" is the intended focus). 


2) The idea of a (potentially) four-dimensional referential seems nonsense to
me, at least
until mankind be able to time-travel.
It is of course "nonsense" or at least not particularly useful, but was an interesting side effect of the design that might have appeal to science fiction fans, so we discuss it. 


What about aspect, which is a purely timelike
structure? With a 4D referential, you should have the notions of "beginning",
"continuing"
and "ending" in space as well as in time. Or you should treat time
separately, as most
human languages do.
Again, the nature of the design made it easy to treat time and space together and equivalently, so we do, which allows the possibility of "time-travel tenses". The use of aspect in space tenses works and has seen application in Lojban. 


3) I've been (pleasantly) striked by the fact that there are about 2,000
gismu. It happens
that *all* human languages have about this number of root words (e.g.
Japanese have
1,850 essential kanji). It seems to be true for almost every communication
system,
provided it can express enough concepts to convey an everyday life situation.
This is
not a remark, but a question : was this deliberately chosen, or is it a
consequence of
the "mankindness" of Lojban conceptors?
Actually there are only 1350 gismu. It is in part intentional in that some of the language designers felt that the number should be comparable to or smaller than the number of roots in most natural languages, and it was partially because that was the practical limit of what we had time and manpower to research in making the gismu list. The number has proven sufficient, so that very few words were added after the initial list was created (under 100 over several years). 


4) This *is* a criticism. I do *not* like Lojban's use (or, rather, un-use)
of punctuation.
Using the dot and comma as "letters" is indeed legitimate, from a phonetical
point of
view (Shaelian has only two punctuations, namely weak pause and strong
pause). But
it seems that Lojban has been designed to be spoken and heard, rather than
read.
Linguistic theory assumes that spoken language is primary, and Lojban was originally designed for linguistics work. While in practice it is used mostly as a written language, the design requirement that sound and text match exactly puts considerable limits on what can be done with punctuation as a visual symbol. Specifically, any usage of punctuation has to be reflected in the words itself. Thus, as John Cowan said, you can put a question mark on a question, you must still mark the question with one of the question words. Likewise all other punctuations have corresponding words that MUST be used, whether or not their symbols appear. 


When
reading, signs such as semicolon, colon, interrogation, and so on, do replace
the
mimics or intonation of the locutor.
Lojban has *no* intonation significance. You can read Lojban in an absolute monotone and it will not change the meaning in the least. 


Why not use them, even if unnecessary in spoken language?
They are not only unnecessary, but they are to some extent distracting if the listener is from a native language that uses different intonation rules than the speaker. 


You do not read written text letter-after-letter (or I hope you do
not) : you normally grasp several lines at a glance, and then mentally parse them.
Nobody has reached that skill level yet with Lojban, but we admit that the language was not designed for speed-reading. 


This
is why line-
or word- breaks are not a difficulty. In particular, i *do* hate this usage
of ".i" to mark a
strong pause.
I don't understand this criticism. The use of ".i" exactly corresponds to a period at the end of a sentence, except that the period in that word marks the start of the following sentence. Thus only at the end of a paragraph would there be no "period". 



b) It seems that Lojban's grammar is regularly updated (although it
essentially remains
the same). What is the way to be kept informed about these evolutions?
The grammar was first frozen in the early 1990s, though there were a few technical changes that cropped up when the reference grammar was being written. The language grammar was frozen in 1997 for a minimum of 5 years after all of the language definition books are published (and they have not yet all been published, so the effective baseline will be at least 10 years total). 

lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org