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Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?
John E Clifford wrote:
This is all getting very confusing to me; I either don't get the point
of various comments or I don't see the relevance of them to what I think
is the topic at hand (which long ago ceased to be about learning Lojban
-- we ought to change the title). Let try to sort some things out for
my own benefit.
SAEss is a late derivative (and probably the result of a
misunderstanding) of SAEsl, a term Whorf apparently coined. It happens
that all of the ss languages are also sl, which reenforces the confusion.
The fact that Lojban has adjectives and verbs and common nouns -- or
doesn't -- is largely irrelevant to the question whether it is a SAE
("thing"), property, process or sensation language.
lo, loka lopu'u, and loli'i should be able to express these,
respectively (and we have a few other abstractors as well. Whether they
semantically match the targeted languages is less clear.
I guess you might argue that sticking lo on a property, process, etc
makes it grammatically a "thing", but I think that is an artifact of
translating the expressions into English, where sumti become grammatical
nouns or gerunds. Nora has always looked at brivla as being more
verblike than any other part of speech, with the various cmavo acting on
the grammatical roles but not really changing the Lojban semantics
(though again translating the semantics into English tends to invoke
English parts of speech).
I am still remembering my efforts at translating Nootka, wherein I
expressed entire sentences as complex tanru, never using any sumti at all.
It can (more or
less by design) reproduce the effects of all sorts of languages, but to
do so, it must convert properties or processes or sensations into
things.
No. cmavo convert brivla into sumti or mexso or ..., but none of those
are necessarily "things".
lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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