On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:08, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:It might be useful to list the ways in which Lojban fails to meet human language standards. I personally can't think of one (even xorlo has, alas, human analogs). Remember that at least one school of linguists think that all sentences in any natural language are merely transforms of predicate logic sentences, with minor loss of information.Oops. In theory iirc Lojban can require processing depths that no human language in fact has (though I am not sure that there is a theory that says they can't have it) and some parts of Lojban do require keeping in mind the details of the developing sentence structure which again exceed the need in natural languages (again only in fact perhaps).(Quoting from two different emails for convenience...)I am, very very fortunate not be part of the school of linguistics that believes in silly things like transformations (nor Russel's teapot). When I say that Lojban violates things that human languages do, I'm not appealing in any sense to "Universal Grammar;" I'm simply say that, when you look at the languages of the world (henceforth, "languages"), certain things happen and certain things don't. Maybe they CAN, but the fact that they don't is pretty telling about human brains process speech.
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. If you get more than four, you ALWAYS have some sort of marking (most often as an oblique phrase; i.e., a preposition or a postposition)) that indicates how the additional argument relates to the predicate. Yet, Lojban has gismu which take more than four arguments. If it were testable, I would put a LOT of money the fact that, after Lojban was released into the wild, you could do a text count and find that predicates rarely, if ever, have more than three arguments in them, and that the three arguments pretty much always had the three closest to the gismu.
The second problem (or second half of this first problem) is that some of the gismu seem to have tons of extra stuff in them that is not something that would be included in the meaning of a word in any language. "Bucket," for example, contains a predicate slot for the material the bucket is made from. This, as far as I could tell, was thrown in to make the gismu have more slots. The material a bucket is made of has far less to do with bucketness than, say, all of the things in klama have to do with going. And why does "bucket" have it and not, say, "bird"? I can call something that isn't a living bird (say, a drawing of a bird), but why doesn't it a gismu slot to indicate it's material? If buckets get a slot for material, so should everything.