[lojban] Re: Archivist: ba'a - ba'a cu'i - ba'a nai

[Bob LeChevalier <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Arnt Richard Johansen wrote:
> What is the history of the ba'a/ba'acu'i/ba'anai scale? What, if any,
> is the natural-language inspiration for it? Does a Hopi equivalent
> exist?

I'd have to do a lot of digging to be sure about this.  But here's a 
quick response.  See if it suffices, and ask for further digging if 
necessary.

The core set of evidentials came from two sources, a letter from a 
long-time Loglanist turned Lojbanist in California who identified the 
evidentials as something very different about certain languages (one of 
which may have been Hopi) that might be worthy of Whorfian 
consideration, and the set of actual evidentials used in the constructed 
language Laadan, invented by linguist Suzette Hayden Elgin for a science 
fiction book (later a series).  She eventually put out a book on the 
language, which I "borrowed" several features of to make sure the 
language was as complete as possible.

However.  Not all things classed as evidentials came from that set. 
When we cobbled together the lists of possible attitudinals, some of 
them seemed to be less "attitudes" or "emotional reactions" than "what 
led me to make this statement".   Most of the borderline cases went into 
those cmavo labeled "discursives", but especially when I found one that 
could be paired with another concept, I didn't hesitate to set up a 
pair.  In this case, after a quick look on the web at some known sets of 
evidentials (none of which I used in my original work, but it gives you 
some basis to look over how linguists are dealing with such things now, 
20 years later)
http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/miniatures/eviden.htm
http://people.umass.edu/pspeas/Epistemology%20and%20Indexicality/SpeasWorldAgr.pdf
http://au.geocities.com/austlingsoc/proceedings/als2001/curnow.pdf

I suspect that the "I experience" evidential was there, and the other 
two may have started as discursives, or possibly "I recall" was also an 
evidential as well, and I merged them to save cmavo space.

Let me know if you need more.

lojbab



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