[lojban] Re: S-W/ was Re: (no subject)/Borges

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Exactly what role gender/classifier system places in all the metaphysical argle-bargle is not very
clear from either Sapir or Whorf.  What is clear is that it does play very little of the obvious
sort of role -- things are not treated/viewed like their gramatical gender, in general (see all
the familiar odd cases). The same applies to case/prepositions, except inso far as the overall
pattern applies.  That is, languages which do a lot with bound morphemes (case or the expanded
forms in say Finnish)may treat these sorts of relations differently from those that use free
morphemes (prepositions, wherever they occur).  If so (and I think -- given the virtual absence of
any reliable data on any of this -- that we cannot say one way or the other), we would exp[ect
Lojban to be somewhat more like Finnish than English in whatever area this plays a role.
 
--- Arika Okrent <arika@okrent.com> wrote:

> The effects on 
> > world-view and
> > habitual behavior is attributed to obligatory grammatical categories of a 
> > language.  So,
> > vocabulary plays no role in the matter at all
> 
> Except that so much of what would normally be represented by case systems, or classifier systems
> or other such grammatical apparatus is stuffed into the lexically specified (and therefore
> obligitory) argument structure of the gismu -- this is the aspect of the loglangs that is the
> strangest to me.  And also the place where the "classification of the universe" problem comes
> in.
> 
> -a
> 
> ************
> Arika Okrent
> arika@okrent.com
> http://www.wickedoasis.org/arika
> 
> 
> 
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