On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:30 PM, tijlan
<pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:
Gizon-a | etorri da.
Vir-o | ekalvenis.
lo nanmu | co'i/ba'o klama
Gizon-ak | mutil-a | ikusi du.
Vir-o | knab-on | vidis.
lo nanmu | lo nanla | pu viska
In Lojban, on the other hand, cases are
[...]
It therefore buffers the
difference between the nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive
languages. It allows a Basque/Tibetan/Mayan etc. speaker to
communicate with an English/Japanese/Esperanto etc. speaker without
being distracted at the aforementioned dissimilarity.
So then does English also buffer the difference between the two, since it also does not morphologically specify case? I think Lojban is as nominative-accusative as it gets. (Predicate logic was invented by people who spoke and were familiar with nominative-accusative languages.) If the correct Lojban for the first sentence were "klama lo nanmu" (not "klama *fa* lo nanmu), then we could probably say that Lojban is ergative-absolutive.