Re: [lojban] [hedybos@hotmail.com: Feedback (long, sorry)))]

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Robin Lee Powell scripsit:

> I am not anywhere near enough of a linguist to handle this.

I'll tackle it.

Hedy Bos scripsit:

> -The denotation is hell. A period expressing a phoneme? Why? And
> what?s with the phobia for the symbol ?h?? If your defence is ?it is
> used only to separate vowels?, then there still would be no reason
> why the symbol ?h?  could n?t be used.

Morphologically the aspirate is neither a vowel nor a consonant, and
neither is the glottal stop, so we avoid symbols associated with vowels
and consonants for them.  The symbols we use are readily available on
typewriter keyboards and in handwriting.

> I don?t think Lojban needs to specify everthing in such a frantic
> way. It?s logical, people can think for themselves.  Common people
> have no use for such specifications as mentioned in the section about
> deictics. They will not use such forms. 

There is no one feature in Lojban, as far as we know, that is not found
in some natural language.

In addition, the notion that "common people won't" do this or that
flies in the face of the evidence.  Languages are learned by
nonspecialists (we are all nonspecialists when we are children), and
some of them make far more complicated distinctions than Lojban does --
and many such distinctions are mandatory, whereas in Lojban almost
everything is optional.

> -the assumption that natural languages are inadequate aggravates me.

Inadequate for certain purposes, not for every purpose.  If they were
really adequate for all purposes, mathematics would never have been
invented.

> I am convinced that if something does not occur in a natural language
> this must be for a (simple) reason: it doesn?t work!

If the invading Bantu speakers had annihilated the Khoi-San speakers
before Europeans met them, instead of just confining them to the area
around the Cape of Good Hope, we'd probably be convinced today that clicks
"didn't work" in natural languages.

In any case, if you want a natural language, you know where to find
6,000 of them.

> -why so many arguments for one stem? Why not express these with 
> prepositions?

Rather than constructing another ad hoc pile of prepositions to go along
with the ad hoc pile of predicates that all languages have, Lojban
constructs its prepositions directly from its predicates.  So rather
than supplementing a simple verb "to come/go" with prepositions
indicating origin and destination, the prepositions of origin and
destination are constructed from the verb "to come/go".

> -why use separate stems for compounding? It does make the entire
> utterance shorter, but it also increases the number of forms to
> be learned.

The bound morphemes (rafsi) are an awkward compromise, admittedly.  They
are an attempt to ensure two separate kinds of unambiguity simultaneously:
that sentences can be unambiguously divided into words, and that words
can be unambiguously divided into morphemes.  Thus, given two consecutive
morphemes, it must be possible to tell whether they are in two separate
words or not.  To make this possible, we provide separate bound and free
forms for all morphemes except structure words.  The alternative would be
to create a word-delimiting morpheme, which would be far more unnatural.

> By the way: how does one derive causative forms, stative forms etc.?
> Are they derived from the same root or do they have separate forms? I
> think the first option would be more logical.

Causative forms are compounded using the four Lojban causal predicates.
Stative forms are made by simple ellipsis, as in Lojban there are no
required arguments.

-- 
LEAR: Dost thou call me fool, boy?      John Cowan
FOOL: All thy other titles              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
             thou hast given away:      jcowan@reutershealth.com
      That thou wast born with.         http://www.reutershealth.com