[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [lojban] Response ro Robin's "Essay on the future of Lojban"



On 10 April 2010 23:11, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
The issue is not, I think, one of narrow-mindedness.  Most linguists are interested in theoretical frameworks of understanding how languages work, and what they do in the wild.  Conlangs don't really help with this.  Although Lojban and Toki Pona and a few others have interesting linguistic facts, they nonetheless fail to provide insight into what language is and how it works and develops* (since, by definition, they have been designed and not developed naturally).  And, since most conlangs completely lack anything of linguistic interest, it isn't surprising that the few that do tend to be missed.

What's more, most conlangs (again with a few notable exceptions) look very, very much like the native language of their designer(s). Lojban is included in this category, by the way: in terms of word order, general morphological processes, etc., Lojban looks very much like a nicely behaved Indo-European language, albeit one with extensions for the aspects of predicate logic. There isn't much reason to look at conlangs for linguistic evidence or theory (although sociolinguistic aspects and other things could certainly be of interest).

One obvious non-Indo-European aspect of Lojban is that its words don't inflect. And, unlike English, French, etc., its predicate has no division of the verb and the adjective, much like Arabic, Thai, Chinese, etc. Also worth noting is that, unlike Esperanto, Lojban isn't overtly specific about its morphosyntactic alignment; while Esperanto is explicitly nominative-accusative, Lojban is not. (In fact, I'm not sure which Lojban belongs to. Could it be the active-stative?)

As to the word order, Lojban can realise both SVO and SOV without marking the arguments:

 mi viska ra (eng: I see it)
 mi ra viska (jpn: watasi-wa sore-o miru)

If by word order you meant branching, Lojban is not entirely right-branching:

 lo cmana poi mi viska ke'a (eng: a mountain which I see)
 lo poi mi viska ke'a ku'o cmana (jpn: watasi-ga miru yama)

And some experimental forms like:

 le mlatu sepo le ratcu (jpn: neko-no nezumi) = le ratcu po le mlatu (eng: the rat of the cat)

There are more to the similarity between Lojban and Japanese, but I'm having difficulty putting it into English. For one thing, briefly, the distinction between the subject, object, and complement in Japanese is not as important as in English, which has led some notable Japanese linguists to suggest that every verb argument in this language is basically a complement of equal significance in its relation to the predicate, which sounds like what terbri are to its selbri in Lojban.

I'm not a linguist, but I have been interested in the subjects since when I started learning Lojban.

mu'o mi'e tijlan

--
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.