[lojban] Re: Lojban Vs. Esperanto

[Adam Raizen <araizen@newmail.net>]

de'i li 2003-07-17 ti'u li 18:50:00 la'o zoi. c1tk .zoi cusku di'e
                        
>>From what I read, Esperanto uses 2 forms of nouns, the nominative
>("subject") and accusative ("object"), allowing the 2 nouns and the
>verb to be arranged in any order -- but this potentially causes
>problems when the "object" of one relation turns out to be the
>"subject" of another relation, in the case "John killed the man
>who had the knife". In this case the only relief seems to be to fall
>back on the conventions of Indo-European grammar, but I may be wrong
>here.

Esperanto has fairly free word order, but it's not *that* free.
That sentence in Esperanto is "Johano mortigis la viron, kiu havis
la trancxilon". The relative pronoun "kiu" ("who") is in the nominative,
thus clearly showing that the man is the subject of the subordinate
clause. You can't move nouns out of the clause that contains them,
and I would be surprised if it's possible in any language (it 
certainly isn't in Lojban).

mu'o mi'e .adam.