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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The situation with Swahili (and other Bantu languages) is different for any
> number of reasons.  First off, the language prefix exists as part of a
> system in which EVERY NOUN starts with a prefix that indicates its noun
> class.  The prefixes thus exist as part of an entire system; it's not just
> something that language names do, it is something that all nouns everywhere
> in the language do.

Are you saying that prefixes are acceptable to the human brain as long
as all words in the language use them, but
unacceptable/hard-to-deal-with if only a restricted class of words use
them? That doesn't sound plausible to me.

> Plus, the prefixes on the nouns (or, more
> appropriately, the class of nouns to which a word belongs, which is
> indicated by the prefix) are used for a variety of syntactic functions--you
> can tell who is doing what to whom by virtue of prefixes that go on the
> verbs, which correspond to the noun classes that are marked on the nouns.

So prefixes are ok as long as they do enough work, but not if they
don't do enough work? (In the present case, they serve two purposes:
morphologically, they help to identify the word as belonging to a
certain syntactic class, a brivla, semantically, they indicate what
class of things the predicate refers to. Isn't that enough load?

>  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 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.

But the ban-/baur- prefix is quite helpful! It tells you to expect a
brivla, and furthemore, one related to a language.

> My point with starting everything with some form of "bang" means that your
> brain will not be able to do anything at all to get any closer to what you
> were trying to say.  Plus, it won't help me if we're in a loud room and I
> don't quite here what you said.  If the first element was meaningful with a
> system, then it can help in both of those ways.

But the prefix is meaningful! Perhaps a bit less meaningful than a
language-family prefix might be, but more meaningful than a random
string of letters.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.