Re: [lojban] Suggestion for a new animacy marker in Lojban.

On Saturday, August 4, 2012 11:42:21 AM UTC+4, aionys wrote:

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 12:35 AM, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:

Suggestion for a new animacy marker in Lojban.

Many if not most languages divide all predicates into levels of animacy.
English, for instance, has at least two levels. These are the pronouns for them

1. Animate. He/she
2. Inanimate. It

This allows quickly determine agents of most actions.
Example:
The woman was looking at the mirror. It was ugly.
Let's try it in Lojban.

{lo ninmu pu ca'o catlu lo minra .i ta pu tolmelbi}

{my. pu tolmelbi}

No, too ambiguous. And I opine that counting two sumti back in order to use {ra} is much trickier for human brain than just understanding semantic roles of sumti.
Therefore, I suggest introducing a new marker reflecting animacy of any object. I'll use {xoi} which currently bears no official meaning.

xoi - marks preceding construct as animate
xoinai - marks preceding construct as inanimate

{lo ninmu pu ca'o catlu lo minra. i ta xoinai pu tolmelbi}

However, some languages have more levels of animacy.
The father was looking at his son. He was beautiful.
{lo patfu pu catlu lo bersa .i ta xoixime'i pu melbi}
The author of this sentence probably thinks that children are less animate than grown-ups.

So we can build a scale ranging from most animate objects to inanimate.
It's only the speaker who decides what level of animacy this or that object has.

Gender-specific pronouns.

You might argue why not add more specific markers reflecting for instance the gender of the object described.
Let's repeat once again.

English has at least two levels. These are the pronouns for them

1. Animate. He/she
2. Inanimate. It

In other words, English has two pronouns expressing sex but only one pronoun expressing inanimate objects.
There might be languages that split inanimate levels into other specific classes (furniture, houses, weapons).

Therefore, it would be stupid to try to import all those quirks of natlangs. {ta poi nakni} is fine.

Unsettled issues.
Some languages have "abstractions" in their lowest level of animacy hierarchy.

Lojban is pretty strict when dealing with objects and abstractions. The issue with the scale "su'unai - su'u" that one might imagine remains unsettled.

I'm one of those weirdos that thinks that the restriction of "it" to only inanimate objects is a bad idea. It is precisely because of that evolution that we have people trying to replace what "it" used to mean with "Singular They" and "ey, eir, em", and "somepony", all of which are, at least in my opinion, absolutely horrid and ineffectual substitutes for just saying frakking IT.

Further, we don't actually have that distinction. It's really more of a very fuzzy line.

The celebration-of-a-new-birth balloons/cards/etc. all say "It's a boy!" and "It's a girl".

We call our ships, cars, motorcycles, planes, ..., "she". ("Oh, a vintage 1950 Thunderbird?!" "Yeah, the old girl's still a beauty, ain't she?")

On a show I watch called "New Girl", the theme song goes "Who's that girl? It's Jess!" Not "Their Jess!", not even "She's Jess!".

Arguably any human knows the difference between the animate and the inanimate, and from what I've seen, words that explicitly provide that distinction just makes things harder. We don't need to have an "(in)animate marker". If you want to be unambiguous as to what you are referring to, don't use ambiguous reference.

--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )