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

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Friday 09 April 2010 13:32:38 Christopher Doty wrote:
> This is an interesting issue, I think, because I see the idea of
> "mind-bending stuff," while certainly very cool, to be diametrically
> opposed to any hope of having Lojban widely adopted as an
> international/auxiliary/talking-to-computers/whatever language--there are
> plenty of things that natural languages do which are plenty mind-bending to
> speakers of English, but they don't violate general principles of what
> languages do and what they don't do, while Lojban does in any number of
> respects.

I don't see many ways Lojban violates general principles of languages. The 
following traits are AFAIK unique to the Loglanic family:
*Terminators for grammatical constructs, to enable unambiguous parsing.
*An indefinitely long sequence of verb arguments, instead of a morphosyntactic 
alignment.
*Verbs, common nouns, adjectives, and adverbs combined into one part of 
speech. But there are universals concerning the combining of these parts of 
speech.
*Unambiguously lexable and parsable words (even Esperanto fails that, 
as "avaro" can mean either "avarice" or "collection of grandfathers").

There are other language families with unique features. Mayan languages have a 
part of speech found in no other languages; Afro-Asiatic has roots consisting 
of consonants which are inflected by inserting different vowels; Salishan 
languages have words that challenge the notion of syllable.

But when I compared Lojban to a list of universals, I found only one clear 
violation (and a lot of n/a's): in a phrase like "these three blue houses", 
if all three modifiers are on the same side of the head word, the number is 
in the middle of the three. The Lojban is "ci vi blanu zdani", and the word 
for "these" is a spatial tense.

Pierre
-- 
When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates.
Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.

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