In a message dated 1/28/2002 8:55:39 AM Central Standard Time, arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes:That's a reasonable assumption, but objectionable. Lojban decided to adopt Errh, you can't have it both ways: the Japanese system is inherently marked, since it requires the particles, whether they are place counters (displaced word-order) or contentful (BAI and the like). The fair thing, from your point of view would seem to be to require place markers for arguments even when in place and not allow unmarked sumti at all. Not likely! And why is the assumption -- which has to underlie any dictionary: that the word order given is the normal word order -- objectionable? Some word order is going to be set, why not the publicly offered one? <My concern is that where Lojban offers multiple ways to say the same thing, and some ways are more SAE-like than others, we have a natural tendency to go for the more SAE-like way -- it certainly facilitates communication. I just think that this natural tendency should not be elevated to the status of normative good style.> Even if it clearly IS good style? Is being SAEish inherently antithetical to good Lojban style? I can't think of any reason to think this, but it seems to be the burden of your remarks -- and of xod's. As you have pointed out, several Lojban preferences are SAE and also commmon in many other language families (VSO is relatively rare, for example -- Loglan did not take it over from Logic because it created problems with various S-less sentence types. Even it requires only one additional syllable.) I suppose that the point is that we don't want to use an SAE form simply because it is familiar and, since it is hard to prove that that wasn't why you used it, the safest bet for those that are concerned about such things is to use something radically non-SAE. But that often favors the strange and rare over the ordinary and common, even when there are good reasons why something is strange and rare (euphuistic for example, which is rare because it is gloriously inefficient and confusing). Note please that none of this has anything to do with the Whorf hypothesis. It is not about position or particle or about word order or .... It is about fundamental syntactic types. Lojban may be somewhat SAEish even here, since it has things and their properties/activities, rather than Whorf's favorite Hopi-all verb language, but at least it got rid of the distinction among properties and activities somewhat |