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Re: [lojban] Tanru automatically forming



Your suggestion seems counterintuitive to me. The relationship between a modified word and its modifier (a tanru) seems much closer than that between a predicate and its arguments, so marking arguments seems more reasonable than separating modified/modifiers, especially when more than two words are involved, e.g., "barda bajra nelci gerku bangu" (a nonce phrase, of course).
stevo
On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
I know this is vastly too fundamental to be changed at this stage of the language's development, but why do tanru automatically form? Presumably the more common a construction is, the fewer cmavo it should take to say it. (This isn't a direct correlation, though; for example, NU constructions are very common, but by their nature there is probably no way to avoid having some cmavo to deal with them.) And certainly {lo gerku cu klama} is more common than {lo gerku klama cu bajra}. Why wasn't it decided in the ancient (Loglan?) days to have tanru form only with a cmavo? To clarify, suppose the cmavo were {ja'ei}* for the default grouping ({ke} and friends would still work the same way without needing {ja'ei}). Then {lo gerku klama} would be "the dog goes" while {lo gerku ja'ei klama bajra} would be "the dog-kind-of-goer runs". Isn't this a bit more sensible than what is established now?

*Certainly in an actual situation like this, this cmavo would be a CV, since it would be pretty common. I'm fairly sure there are no CVs to spare now, though, so it would've been confusing to use one.

mu'o mi'e .latros.

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