Re: [lojban] Re: I love Lojban's approach, but what's the deal with place tags?

[Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>]

Yeah Joel, I think what you're missing at this early stage in your learning is that both FA and knowing the place structures are extremely important if you want to be fluent.

I understand your concerns.  You agreed that I was representing your argument accurately.  What you may have misunderstood was that my last paragraph about "if one group of people liked the place structure.... been dropped out of the language by this group)" was mildly sarcastic.

The idea of a group of people using lojban and simply forgetting/dropping FA and/or the default place structure of the gismu is completely absurd.  It could happen, but it would take (my guess) centuries of shifting for that to happen.  It's so fundamental to a proper understanding of the language that if anyone dropped FA or began forgetting the place structures, I would argue that it was darn-near a completely different language.

I'd put it on par with English switching to a system more like what they have in Turkey (as you describe it).  Such a thing would be (at best) an extremely bastardized version of English.  Likewise, lojban without FA would be quite a stretch.

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:17 AM, Joel T. <joelofarabia@gmail.com> wrote:

That was my point exactly. True fluency means completely internalizing
a language so that the words just flow out of your mouth without
thinking. You're completely "out of the book" to use a chess
_expression_. And a community of truly fluent people would be influenced
more by each other than any conscious thought given to the official
rules of grammar. A true Sapir-Whorf test would demand nothing less.

The point I'm making about running two systems side-by-side is that in
any community of truly fluent people, either one of them would get
phased out, or they would diverge in meaning, usage, connotation etc.
At the very least it would become a way of differentiating between
cliques, which is the thin end of the wedge for dialectisation. You
just can't have two ways of doing exactly the same thing with only
whim to choose between them. It's great in class, but in the field
it's not tenable. It's not how language works.

On Apr 4, 10:04 pm, Luke Bergen <lukeaber...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think his point was that these dialectic splits could result in two groups
> of people not being able to understand one another.
>
> If one group of people liked using the place structure so much that they
> just ignored FA what would happen if they saw something like {fi lo zdani cu
> klama fa mi lo zarci} and got completely confused (you know, cuz generations
> later FA  would have basically been dropped out of the language by this
> group).
>

> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Michael Turniansky <mturnian...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> > On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Joel T. <joelofara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> In any case, surely running two systems side-by-side is asking for
> >> dialectisation (is that a word?), where speakers in one area get used
> >> to one system while speakers in another prefer the other?
>
> >   It can, and does.  But we consider the flexibility to be a plus.  That
> > way, any person coming from a natural language background of say, Turkish,
> > can from sentences the way that seems most natural to them, while someone
> > coming from an English background can form setnences the most natural way to
> > them.  And both will be understood equally well.  We had, for example, a
> > while a back, a discussion over which was "better": to use "cu" often, or to
> > totally eschew it in favor of sumti that are competely terminated so that
> > there was no need for it (i.e. "lo gerku cu barda" vs. "lo gerku ku
> > barda").  There are vocal proponents on each side, so it amounts to a
> > dialectical split, but.. so what?
> >                --gejyspa
>
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