Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-announcements] Essay on the future of Lojban, with a simple poll for the community.

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I see two, maybe three, areas where there is a problem from a linguistic
> perspective.  The first is that languages do not have verbs with more than
> four unmarked slots for a predicate, and there are VERY few that have four;
> the vast majority of verbs in the vast majority of languages have three or
> less.

That has always been my opinion too. In practice however, there are
some mitigating factors (some of which you mentioned) that makes this
almost a non-issue for Lojban.

One factor is that many argument places are just fluff ("by standard
x", "under conditions x", "of material x", and such) that nobody ever
uses and exist mostly for decoration, and to give headaches to anyone
trying to figure out what rule was used to decide whether to include
them or not in any given argument structure.

Another factor is that In the really few cases where four or five
arguments are more or less justifiable by the meaning of the word,
they are practically never used together. So you might say "mi klama
fu lo karce", but you won't see much or any actual usage with all five
places of "klama" filled.

> I think this is what you meant by "processing
> depth"--the problem is that most humans actually CAN'T PROCESS at the depth
> needed for a gismu with seven places.

I suspect he was referring to center embedding. Structures like "the
dog the cat the mouse feared chased died".


> But, in Lojban, EVERYTHING that makes a
> predicate looks like everything else that makes a predicate.

Not quite. "blanu", "du", "go'i", "fu'ivla", "pavyseljirna",
"bangrsua'ili", "me mi moi", "da zei djan" are all predicates and look
quite different. Even if we only consider gismu, they come in three
different flavours:

CCV,CV
CV,CCV
CVC,CV

all two syllables, but different kind of syllables.

> I would very
> much doubt that memorizing the 1300 or so gismu in Lojban would be at all
> comparable to learning 1300 of, say, Spanish, because there is more for your
> brain to stick to.

For an English speaker, the Spanish words would probably be easier.
For a Chinese speaker, my guess is that the Lojban words would be
easier.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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