RE: [lojban] observatives (was RE: a construal of lo'e & le'e

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

>>> Craig <ragnarok@pobox.com> 10/29/01 02:19am >>>
#>Not a "rule" per se, but a convention, just as the "story-time" convention
#>applies to interpreting the tense of most instances of consecutive
#>sentences.  There are other possible uses for ellipsis x1 besides an
#>observative, but that is the one most likely.  Note that it is ellipsis in
#>x1 that marks the observative, and not explicit zo'e in x1.  Part of the
#>magic of the convention is the pragmatic emphasis on the selbri caused by
#>fronting it.
#
#How incredibly culturally biased. Why not emphasize by moving it to the
#BACK, so that it is fresh in the mind as context for the next bridi? Both
#ways are equally valid, why do you assume that one is just how it is to be
#done? The 'pragmatic emphasis' works both ways, in my experience, so "le
#gerku cu blanu"'s only flaw is its wordiness.

It's a bit extreme to call this a cultural bias, because cross-linguistically it's
a relatively universal strategy.

More worrying, though, are the use of "conventions" and the attempt to
associate conventions with word order. If conventions are associated with
word order, then word order will no longer be free and we will not get to
see preferred orders emerge from a usage community that has diverse
L!s (Lojban text nowadays, it seems to me, is much more SVO than it was 
in my early years on this list). What I hate about conventions per se is 
that you can never know for sure whether they're being observed. And,
as the recent big debate about elided ce'u showed, they lead to great
confusion.

--And.