Re: [lojban] Why is there so much irregularity in cmavo/gismu?

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/13/2001 10:41:16 AM Central Standard Time, arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes:

I think part of the problem is that Lojban has a much narrower definition
of 'grammar' and 'grammatical' than is normal in linguistics and than is
normally included within the 'grammar' of natural languages. This is not
necessarily a Mistake, because an invented language is a different
sort of creature from a natural language. At any rate, the role of a
grammar is normally taken to be the rules that define a mapping from
phonological structures to sentence meanings; the grammar generates
all the well-formed sentences of the language, where sentences are
defined as pairings between meanings and phonological forms.
Lojban 'grammar' does something totally different: it defines a set
of phonological strings and structurings of the words therein, but says
nothing about their meanings. Natural language simply has no
analogue of this 'pseudogrammar'.

While I agree that there are many questions about Lojban usage and meaning that are unresolved, I have to protest And's description  -- and prescription -- on grammar.  While his usage is not idiosyncratic, it is not nearly so universal as he would make it seem: still current phrases like "transformational grammar". "phrase structure grammar", "Montague grammar" and the like refer to things in the same class and role as Lojban grammar (with the difference that Lojban grammar, being prescriptive, actually does what it says it is to do).  The most And can clearly say of Lojban is that it has only half of what an ideal grammar would have (which is 2/3 more than any other language has, by the way), a mapping between sound sequences and grammatical utterances.  What is missing is the semantic component, from grammatical utterance to sentence meaning, where Lojban is not significantly better off than many ordinary langauges (except for having secure grammatical sentences) and may even be behind in some areas. Many grammarians would be seriously put out if parts of the sentence to meaning mechanism were incorporated into the sound to sentence mechanism, though, again, this is not a universal objection and several such combinations have enjoyed a measure of success over the last half-century (and some have been disasters, but so have some pure cases).  In any event, "pseudogrammar" for Lojban's quite successful syntax is misleadingly denigrating, as though Lojban's situation were somehow different from -- and inferior to -- that of natural languages.