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Re: [lojban] Lettorals
But you understand the point right? English has essentially three generic pronouns, "he", "she", and "it". There are different tensed versions of those three, and maybe you can include "this" and "that" but essentially you've got only a handful of pronouns none of which gives any direct hint as to what is the antecedent. In what universe is that in any way better than the pronoun system that we have in lojban?
In fact, one thing that's been really pissing me off about english lately is the inability to refer to a human being with a personal pronoun that doesn't imply a particular gender. The best I've been able to come up with is "friend". Every other personal pronoun/name-functioning-as-pronoun in english implies a gender ("buddy, guy, dude, sir, dad, grandpa, etc..." are all clearly male.)
While in lojban we have everything under BY, KOhA, and DA which are all gender agnostic.
Here, a better example of how the english pronoun system sucks: "after putting the disk in the cabinet, Mabel sold it." The fact that this is possible while still being grammatical (and I run into it often enough that this is kind of a hot-button point for me) is why english pronouns are screwy at best and why I think lojban actually did this bit quite well.
.iku'i ro prenu cu se krali lo nu jinvi to lo srera .u'i toi
On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 1:09 AM, Ivo Doko
<ivo.doko@gmail.com> wrote:
In that case the intonation of the voice and accentuation will give
clues as to what "he" refers to - Bob or Billy. There's no such tool
in lojban. Although even without intonation/accentuation, it is more
probable that "he" will refer to subject (Bob) rather than the object
(Billy) of the previous sentence (unless specifically stressed, e.g.
"Bob hit *BILLY*. *HE* is eight."). Furthermore, most speakers would
not phrase such an utterance like that (split into two sentences) but
would more likely say either "Bob, who is eight, hit Billy" or "Bob
hit Billy, who is eight".
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