Re: why are selbri relations so arbitrary?

[Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>]

la lojbab. cusku di'e

> >The argument for doing selbri the way they are is that prepositions like
> >"to" and "for" have no real meaning outside the particular verb. "To" in
> >English can be a receiver, a destination, or a result, for example. Even
> >if one were to have various different preposition-like things to
> >specifically, the point is that using them would require memorization
> >of even more words, and the prepositions chosen would have a tendency be
> >biased towards English.
> 
> Actually it is plausible that we could have come up with a preposition
> system not biased towards English.  But it is not plausible that we could
> come up with a preposition system that WORKS, with the unambiguity that
> Lojban demands.
> 
.iecai
A preposition system not biased towards English would be biased
towards some other language or be arbitrary, and either of this
options would as hard, or harder, than learning
place-structures.  Prepositions, like case-suffixes, can only
cover a limited number of possible relationships between the
elements of a sentence.  Natlangs solve this problem by having a
small number of "core" meanings of prepositions/cases and
deriving the rest through metaphorical extension.  The classic
example if this polysemic chaining is Lakoff's study of "over" (I
don't have it to hand, but can dig out the reference if anyone's
interested.)

This might not be such a problem for naturalistic pan-European
languages like Interlingua or even Esperanto, but given that
these metaphors are frequently culture-specific, we cannot afford
to have them in Lojban.
> And indeed, in learning any natural language with prepositions, you have to
> learn what prepositions are typically used with each verb/predicate and
> what they specifically mean when attached to a prepositional phrase in a
> sentence.  Easy example from colloquial English: "I am going in the store",
> which can mean that "I am going INTO the store (from outside)", or that "I
> am moving within the store (presumably to a new unspecified location)".
> 

Tell me about it!  I once did an error-analysis of Turkish
students' essays, and mistakes with prepositions were right there
at the top with articles; similarly, most of my grammar mistakes
in Turkish involve case suffixes.  For example:

ENG:  I was afraid of her.
TUR:  On-dan kork-tu-m
      3d+ABL.  be-afraid+PAST+1st
      *I was afraid from her.

ENG:  I was angry with him.
TUR:  On-a kIz-dI-m
      3d+DAT. be-angry+PAST+1st
      *I was angry to him.

co'o mi'e robin.