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Re: [lojban] A Discussion of the Lojban System of Place Structure



Lojban, as usual, strives for the most of all possible worlds.  Thus, for arguments to predicates, it has a place system -- several, in fact -- and a case system of staggering complexity.  The problem -- if it is one -- with the place system, is that the places are not uniform.  To be sure, the first place is generally the subject, as that would be informally understood, and the second is often the direct object (ditto).  From there on (and even there occasionally) the places wander every which way, although there are some families of concepts which give rise to predicates all of which share most of the same places in the same order -- with shocking exceptions and occasional late additions.  Then there are at least two ways to change the surface order of the arguments while keeping the original place information.  In addition, there are the prepositions (mainly, but far from exclusively BAI) that directly convey the information buried in the places of particular predicates and which can be used instead of or in addition to many positional roles.  I am not sure that all subject and direct object notions are covered by these critters, but I know that the most common are -- and are frequently used.  Lojban does not have -- and never will, pretty obviously -- affix cases, but the reputed psychological differences between prepositions and affixes is not significant here (I think).  It is worth noting, however, that most predicates co-occur with only a limited number of prepositions, usually some involved already in their specifications.  There are also an array of prepositions that seem to occur with just about any predicate, and may be deserving of special attention.  As for an optimal system (not one I would propose at this point for Lojban), each predicate would have one or two defined places and a list of likely special prepositions (the later places or ones thought of for those places).  The defined places would be the expected ones, subject and object in their predicate-relative senses, and everything else would be added explicitly.  Several people seem to write this way alrady.



From: la gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 12:17 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] A Discussion of the Lojban System of Place Structure



On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 8:52:52 PM UTC+4, tsani wrote:
Something that bothers me about your paper, which as it stands is quite good, is that you only deal with an extremely small portion of Lojban. You don't touch at all on lujvo, which are what place structures are really for. In the case of purely compositional lujvo, e.g. kansi'u, the place structure lets you infer without any ambiguity or metaphor what the resulting place structure of the lujvo will be, based solely on the knowledge of the component gismu. As for memorizing the place structures of component gismu, one must simply realize that Lojban already *has* a case system. Simply put, rather than having named cases, we have numbered cases, and in many cases, there is a lot of parallelism between gismu of the same semantic category. 

Consider {morji}, {djuno}, {smadi}, {sruma}, {jijnu}, {jimpe}, {senpi}, {birti}, {krici}, and {jinvi}.
morji = x1 remembers fact x2 about x3
djuno = x1 knows fact x2 about x3 by epistemology x4
smadi = x1 guesses x2 about x3
jijnu = x1 intuits x2 about x3
jimpe = x1 understands fact x2 about x3
senpi = x1 doubts that x2 is true
birti = x1 is sure that x2 is true
krici = x1 believes that x2 is true about x3
jinvi = x1 opines that x2 is true about x3 on grounds x4

In the "knowledge" family, which above isn't even complete, one immediately notices the parallelism. This family along with the "family" family (family-relation = x1 is the <type of relationship> of x2 by bond/tie x3; e.g. bersa) and the foods and animals family (food/animal = x1 is a <food/animal> of type/species/etc. x2) make up an extremely large portion of the gismu list.

Now, I concede that even within a family, there are some exceptions, such as birti and senpi, which don't have an "about" place at all, or jinvi and djuno which are the only ones with an x4. Even in the food and animals family, there are some notable oddballs such as lanme ( = x1 is a sheep of species x2 of flock x3). However there being a difference in the number of places *usually* isn't that much of a big deal. If someone accidentally fills in an x3 of birti, any decent listener will understand what is meant, due to the overarching systematic nature of the family to which it belongs. On the other hand, when lujvo are made (according to the rules, that is) oddball places may unfortunately need to be included, which can lead to unexpected place structures in the resulting lujvo.

e.g. jboxlajivdunsi'u = x1 are equal in that they opine that lojban is bad for x2 by standard x3 on grounds of belief x4.

If one forgets that xlali has a standard place in the x3, then if they try to fill in the belief place of jinvi, things can get messy.

Still, I don't know how your proposed case system would cooperate with lujvo (or would it simply drop lujvo from the language?) So I can't say that the status quo is any better or worse.

Finally, semantic families don't always work. {cpedu}, {minde}, and {picki} are in the same family, I'd say, but have place structures divergent in rather irritating ways.

cpedu = x1 requests x2 of x3 in manner x4
minde = x1 orders x2 to x3
picki = x1 begs x2 to x3

However, if one takes into account the emphasis difference, (when ordering something to happen, the person whom is ordered is more important, and therefore moves closer to the front,) then it becomes easier to remember. Also, cpedu2 being the action requested is more useful for translating "He asked for a glass of water." Indeed, in that case, the person of whom that action (giving a glass of water) is far less important (it could be anyone, so in truth, we're just dropping the place entirely by context).

That being said, I strongly push towards efforts to regularize the gismu list in order to make the numeric case system more self-consistent. One of Lojban's major issues is a lack of self-consistency, as pointed out by gleki in his thread about "four different vocabularies."

I started that thread with a completely different complaint, namely ....4 different but parallel sets of words/morphemes for memorising.
 
However, the existence of this multiple vocabularies is not a problem intrinsic to the nature of Lojban, and is thus a whole other can of worms when contrasted with the issues with place structure.

In sum, I believe that trashing place structure is overall a bad idea.

Not at all. It *is* possible to create a language where every gismu will have not more than two places. May be Lojban being spoken by more people will try to change into such thing. Whether such dialect of Lojban will be more easy to learn or not is another question.


Place structure is central to Lojban's ideology, in my opinion, and removing it from Lojban would be like taking the Lojban out of Lojban.

mi zmadu do lo ni barda (I exceed you in property of being big) => mi poi zilkarbi do cu barda (I compared to you is big).
This is how the third place might be removed by those who hate it.

 
Named case systems are used in other conlangs, and if those are more pleasant to you, then perhaps those you should try those out, too.

Even not touching the previous example nobody can remove metaphors from our speech. If Daniel wants to try those in Lojban why stop  'em? 


Still, Lojban remains extremely interesting. It was not made to be easy, and complaints that its cornerstones are complicated are of little weight. As you learn more, you will see that there is a lot of regularity, and that this language still remains immensely more simple than a multitude of others.

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o
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