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Re: [lojban] Re: Translating preposition
> No. "cmavo" has a fourth place for the language. I could say "zoi gy. and .gy.
> mintu zoi .gy. or .gy. enai zoi .gy. if .gy. lo ka ce'u cmavo makau fo lo
> glico".
Ah the elusive places that I forget. Very fair point.
Then, it seems to me like a preposition is simply a [cmavo je tcita], where tcita2 can be various things like a verb, [selbri], a noun, [sumti], or an adjective, [selbri] too I guess. (Would [seltau] be more appropriate? I mean, the gloss for [tanru] is "phrase compound". Isn't "enraged blue dream" a "phrase compound" as well?)
Using [cmavo] has the advantage of getting at cmavo2, the class. I figure that we can group non-lojban cmavo, i.e. prepositions/other structure words, too, into classes. I don't think however that many (at least for English) would have the cmavo2-ability of being interchangeable under all circumstances, maintaining syntactical coherence.
Thoughts?
mu'o mi'e la tsani
On 22 March 2012 23:25, Pierre Abbat
<phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
On Thursday, March 22, 2012 19:03:04 Sid wrote:
> I dunno; it's just kinda weird to use the word to describe non-Lojban
> stuff. I do think that sumtcita are like adpositions, just think it's
> better to make a new word for the general language concept.
There is a place for language-specific grammatical terms (e.g. "nif`al,
hitpa`el, etc." are Hebrew verb forms resembling voices, and make some sense
in other Semitic languages, but no sense out of Afro-Asiatic). This is not one
of them. Members of BAI, and tense markers when not directly before the
selbri, act just like prepositions except that the complement can be dropped
(as in the notice on jbovlaste "ca farvi gau"), so they are prepositions. (I'm
looking at the Wikipedia article, which lists four criteria. The third is
vacuous in Lojban.)
I think that even brivla and cmevla can be called verbs and nouns, so one can
say "Most common nouns are expressed as verbs in Lojban". Verbs have
arguments, just as brivla have sumti. I wouldn't call a sumti a noun phrase,
as usually it doesn't contain a noun; it's either a determiner phrase, or a
pronoun, or some other things like a quoted phrase.
On Thursday, March 22, 2012 20:21:35 Jacob Errington wrote:
> Would it be bad to call an adposition, even from another language, a cmavo?
No. "cmavo" has a fourth place for the language. I could say "zoi gy. and .gy.
mintu zoi .gy. or .gy. enai zoi .gy. if .gy. lo ka ce'u cmavo makau fo lo
glico".
Pierre
--
ve ka'a ro klaji la .romas. se jmaji
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