Re: [lojban] Lettorals

[Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>]

Haha.  If it's better then evolutionary pressure would make it happen.  That's why walking is better than flying in a jet in every way.  Evolutionary processes in biology and in linguistics are lazy.

And yes, English allows you to be unambiguous and clear but the fact that it also allows the lazy speaker to be ambiguous and confusing is a flaw in the language.

I'm confused how you can go through that explanation of what it was that mabel sold and say "see, nice and easy" but then gejyspa's explanation of "it's a pronoun for whatever last started with that letter" is "messy and confusing".  My only recommendation, practice.  I have a strong suspicion that a lojbanist learning english would have a harder time understanding enlgish pronouns than a native english speaker trying to understand lojban anaphora.  Just because it's not your first language doesn't make it inherently messy and complicated.

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 1:58 AM, Ivo Doko <ivo.doko@gmail.com> wrote:

On 27 April 2011 06:35, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> In what universe is that in any way better than
> the pronoun system that we have in lojban?

In ours apparently, because otherwise linguistic evolutionary pressure
would be different and thus would drive the evolution of natural
languages differently.

> 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.)

"Person".

> "after putting the disk in the cabinet, Mabel sold it."

Missing the context. Without it, the only reasonable supposition is
that "it" refers to the cabinet, because in order to sell the disk
without the cabinet would require taking the disk out of the cabinet
again in order to give it to the purchaser, which makes the first part
of the sentence pointless. It's the same reasoning by which the
reference of "they" in

"Monkeys were fed bananas because they were ripe."

and

"Monkeys were fed bananas because they were hungry."

is unambiguous to humans.


--

mu'o mi'e .ivan.

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