Pro-sumti/pro-bridi paper, draft 1.1

[(Mark E. Shoulson) <shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu> id AA00404; Wed, 17 Mar 93 08:36:09 -0500]

>Speakers of Lojban, like speakers of other languages, require mechanisms
>of abbreviation.  If every time we referred to something, we had to express
>a complete description of it, life would be too short to say what we have
>to say.  In English, we have words called "pronouns" which allow us to
>replace nouns or noun phrases with shorter terms.  An English with no
>pronouns might look something like this:

Or, in the words of the ever-popular Schoolhouse Rock:

A pronoun was meant to take the place of a noun, 'cause saying all those
nouns over and over can really wear you down.
                 -"Rufus Xavier Sasparilla", Schoolhouse Rock

Explanation: Schoolhouse Rock was a series of short cartoons with music
intended to teach grammar, science, arithmetic, and American History to
kids watching TV on Saturday mornings in the '70s.  They're mostly fun
nowadays to watch and laugh at dated references and simplifications, and
recently came out on videotape.  I wasted all this bandwidth and wrote
around the globe to tell you this for no real reason, I just felt like
mentioning them when I saw the above paragraph.  Maybe I should give the
whole first verse, which says the same thing:

Now I have a friend named Rufus Xavier Sasparilla.
Now I could say Rufus found a kangaroo that followed Rufus home,
And now that kangaroo belongs to Rufus Xavier Sasparilla.
Whew!  I could say that, but I don't have to, 
'cause I got pronouns, I can say:
*HE* found a kangaroo that followed *HIM* home, and now *IT* is *HIS*.
You see, "he", "him", and "his" are pronouns replacing the noun
Rufus Xavier Sasparilla, a very proper noun, 
and "it" is a pronoun replacing the noun "kangaroo".

Gee, I wonder if we can get permission to use the text in our Lojban
teaching materials.... :-)

~mark