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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 10:06 PM, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?)

I agree with your other points, but why do you say Lojban is not
nominative-accusative? It seems to me that it is exactly that: the
single case of intransitive predicates (the x1-case) is treated
exactly like one of the cases of transitive predicates (the x1-case
again), and for transitive predicates the x1-case is the one that
usually corresponds to the agent, just like the subject case in
nominative-accusative.

Active-stative would require that some intransitive verbs have an
x1-case only while others have an x2-case only, which is never the
case (unless you are thinking of things like "zi'o broda", but I doubt
it's fair to use such unusual cases for the classification).

> 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 would agree that the distinction is less important than in English,
but there is still a distinction. The x1-case especially has very
distinct properties compared with the other cases, and the x2-case to
a lesser extent also has some special properties with respect to the
rest.

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.