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

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

>>> Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu> 11/13/01 03:59pm >>>
#On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Craig wrote:
#> The gismu are fine. It's the rafsi that need work. And while we're at it,
#> can we get rid of selma'o? They are very misleading. the place structure of
#> selma'o is  x2 is the grammatical class containing particle x1  - meaning
#> that by calling them both UI we put xu and .ui in the same grammar class.
#> they play extremely different roles. .ui expresses a feeling. xu makes
#> questions. Sounds the same to me!
#
#Can you construct a sentence where replacing a .ui with xu makes it
#_grammatically_ incorrect?
#
#Can you construct a sentence where replacing a xu with .ui makes it
#_grammatically_ incorrect?
#
#If the answer to both of these is "no", then they are in the same
#grammatical catagory no matter how much you want to complain about it.
#
#se cmavo are only a grammatical distinctions, and indicate very little
#about semantic function.

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'.

So Craig's complaint is really that Lojban 'grammar' is not
defined/described as a natlang grammar is, and the replies from
Jay and pc are unfair, in that they invoke a Lojban-specific
notion of 'grammar'. 

My answer to Craig is that a true grammar of Lojban would take 
many many more years to develop, and the only choice was to
baseline nothing or to baseline the thing that is called 'the Lojban
grammar'. Further, the inventors of Lojban had to choose between,
on the one hand, developing a proper grammar slowly, incrementally 
and unsystematically, and, on the other hand, getting the pseudogrammar
fixed and baselined, and leaving the true grammar (including all issues
concerning meaning) to evolve over the subsequent years.

Hence I would advise Craig not to complain about the pseudogrammar,
but instead to accept that a true grammar has yet to be created.

--And.