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