Re: [lojban] Cultural fu'ivla: summary and list of the ISO generated ones

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 9 April 2010 20:49, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In terms of "how the brain works," what I mean is that the brain processes speech linearly.  But, as with everything in nature, the brain is also lazy, and tries to use context to determine what is coming up.  So, imagine that I say, "The longest word in the English language is a..."
> At this point, your brain has already thrown out a bunch of possibilities.  It's thrown out anything that doesn't start with /a/.  It's also likely already thrown out short words, because I'm looking for something long.  "Ant" is likely not part of the set of words that my brain is looking at.
> "...nt..."
> I still know it isn't ant, but now I also know what it starts with, and what it doesn't. By the time I get to:
> "...idises..."
> You likely know what I'm going to say, assuming you've heard the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" before.  And all that before I got half way through the word!  There are any number of experiment verifications of this: your brain processes language as it goes along, and if that information is not helpful or is not what it expected, it creates problems, because your brain now has to backtrack [...]

In French, adjectives are basically backtrack:

 langue construite (constructed language)

So, if the speaker starts with "langue", the listener waits for the following element which specifies the kind of "langue", which is "construite". And this is how my brain would process the fu'ivla "banjubu'o" as well. "ban...", language, "...jubu'o", Lojban: a language which is Lojban.

In Japanese (and Turkish, Tamil, Basque etc.), the modifier-nucleus order can be almost reverse to English (and Spanish, Arabic, etc.):

 [1]What [-]do [2]you [3]think [4]about [5]this [6]language [-]which [-]has [8]no [9]syntactical ambiguity?
 [9]koubunteki-aimaisei-ga [8]nai [5]kono [6]gengo-[4]o [2]anata-wa [1]dou [3]omou?

Literally:

 syntactical ambiguity no this language about you what think?

As it goes along, "-o" (about) is followed by "anata" (you); do you consider this flow of information helpful? If it's not helpful, it would create problems, according to you. In fact, the word with the most important sentential information, the predicate, "omou" (think), comes at the end of the _expression_. But proficient Japanese speakers are not troubled by that, since their brain works such that it captures the sentence non-linearly, in its entirety, after all of its components have been laid out. It's processing 'as it has gone' rather than 'as it goes along'.

> or, in the case of having language names start with the same thing, has to suddenly sort through the whole list, instead of having paired down in steps.

Still for language names that don't start with the same thing, like "jbobau", the brain has to sort through the whole list of items evoked by that leading element. "jbo...", jbota'a? jboce'u? jboge'a? jbopre? and so on, until it gets decided with "...bau".

mu'o mi'e tijlan

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