[no subject]

[u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw]

>In Lojban, we have the privelege of DEFINING our deep structure.  Whether
>this deep structure has anything to do with human internal deep structure
>(assuming such really exists) is always open to question and if the two
>are too different, the language will either not be learnable, or will be
>learned by a native learner is some way different from our predicted deep
>structure; i.e. there will be noticeable differences in surface structure
>unless by some chance there is an isomorphism or direct transform between
>our designed deep structure and the human deep structure.

So I guess one part of the Lojban learning observation is to see which
kind of deep structure the users would define.  This choice would reflect
the actual human internal deep structure, right?

>Lojban has predicates so far with between 1 and 5 arguments.  All of them
>are 'mandatory' in that they are presumed to have some value in all
>sentences, but all of them are optional, i.e. they may be ellipsized if
>obvious from context, or irrelevant.

The case tag system has some advantages, so I wonder if there are case
tags for prepositions like "to" and "from", which are usually already
expressed by mandatory arguments.  How do you say "What did you do to
her?" in Lojban?

>There is no exact equivalence of "of".  The words be/bei are just grammatical
>separators to attach any arguments onto the'sheriff' argument.

I thought "pe" is quite similar to "of".  So are there any differences
between "le pulji pe la NATinxem" and "le pulji be la NATinxea bei"?

UC> What is the difference between the word-making processes
UC> of Loglan and Lojban, which made the two vocabularies different?

>We used newer population data, and the much higher population of China, and
>the greater literacy among the entire population in Mandarin since 1950
>enormously increased the relative weight of Chinese.
>...
>We also used a good Pinyin dictionary with official Chinese interpretations
>for the IPA values of each letter.  Jim Brown used a hodgepodge that
>was usually Wade-Giles, and presumed that the romanization was accurate as
>to pronunciation, from what I've been able to tell.  He also either
>didn;t
>have a good dictionary, or failed to check himself, because there are a lot
>of strange word choices fro his Chinese (I say this since I did the Chinese
>dictionary work for Lojban myself.

Well, the problem of choosing between synonyms when making Loglan/Lojban
words exists for not only Chinese.  I recall that for "see/view" the word
is vinci/viska.  I guess "view" instead of "see" was chosen because it
would be more consistent with words from other (especially European)
languages.

>I don't know Chinese, and therefore checked doubkly hard to try to get
>words that meant the right thing - oftentimes the Loglan choice
>backtranslates into a less-common denotation of the English word that
>has nothing to do with the intended meaning.  Of course, we probably
>have some silly choices, too, and since I didn;t KNOW Chinese, I may
>have chosen words that are the rarely used variant over a common word.
>I personally am looking forward to someone evetually looking at what we
>did and systematic- ally telling us how bad we really did, but I'm sure
>it was better than the original Loglan work by a large margin.

Well, as long as the choices are reasonably Chinese, (so that Chinese
speakers can recognize it), it wouldn't make much difference.  There
_are_ some equally-frequently-used synonyms in Chinese, so perhaps you
don't have to worry about your translations so much.  I know Chinese and
English, which makes learning new words pretty easy.  (If you ask me to
guess the Lojban word for "blood", my first two guesses would be "ciblu"
and "bluci".  :> )

>You will have us at your beck and call if you can do this.  WE REALLY WANT
>native Chinese speakers to learn Lojban, given the weight we put on the
>language.  I'm cc.ing this message to John Cowan, our chief grammarian, who
>has done some serious reading on Chinese, though he doesn't really know
>the language (he did a translation of a fable from hakka Chinese a couple
>of years ago, though, if people are interested and know that dialect).
>John may have occasional questions about how Chinese works for you and
>others.

I'll do my best on spreading the language, and I'm looking forward to
gladly answer any questions you (esp. Mr. Cowan) have about Chinese.