Cyril Slobin wrote:
On 12/18/07, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:"gismu" is also not a part of speech in the usual sense. The parts of speech in Lojban would be BRIVLA, CMEVLA, A, BAI, ..., ZOhU.I have just now discovered that English language has such a confusion. Correct me if I am wrong, but... In English we can speak, say, about the SVO order. "S" is for "Subject" here, and nobody mistakes "Subject" with "Noun", although noun can (and often do) work as subject.
Actually, English speakers who don't pretend to be linguists get the words mixed up all the time.
The typical American seems to take pride in his utter ignorance of grammatical terminology, which is something one studies in school, and forgets immediately after the test, never again using it in "real life".
One reason I started using "selma'o" was that the phrase "part of speech" would immediately lose a large chunk of an audience of possible Lojban students (the other being that many linguists seem to eschew "part of speech" as being a sloppy term of categorization, whereas Lojban selma'o are precisely defined).
On the other hand, "V" is for "Verb", and we have one word where two are need. I am rather illiterate in English, so the following question may be stupid: which word relates to "verb" the same way as "subject" relates to "noun"? In Russian there are two distinct terms, and people are taught to distinguish them when they are about ten years ago.
While SVO is colloquially referred to as "word order", it technically refers to "component order".
Probably the more accurate statement about SVO for English is S = subject phrase V = verb phrase O = object phraseIn answer to Cyril's question, "verb phrase" is the closest one can come to the correspondence he seeks. But I think that only a linguist talking formally will say "verb phrase" rather than "verb".
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