and whether they are incompatible with Standard Average European languages.
We also search for specific examples of how languages can be constructed unlike those that most of us speak.
This discussion is not necessarily relevant to Lojban (although resume from it could be applied to Lojban later).
Tags for this discussion (separated by comma):
Sapir Whorf hypothesis, linguistic relativity, Sapir, Whorf, snow in Eskimo, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Chomsky, Pinker, Wierzbicka, Lakoff, ...
On Sunday, April 28, 2013 2:16:36 PM UTC+4, la gleki wrote:
On Sunday, April 28, 2013 10:27:20 AM UTC+4, Pierre Abbat wrote:On Saturday, April 27, 2013 22:26:34 la gleki wrote:
> In {la .alis. cu remna} Alice can refer to several people as well.
> Referential use of {le} can help if two participants of the conversation
> have agreed for which object to use it however even in that case there
> might be misunderstanding ( what if speaker A called an apple {le plise}
> but the speaker B unlike the speaker B noticed several apples around).
>
> Other brivla in Lojban are all properties.
> I guess in {lo plise cu xunre} {xunre} is a property, right?
>
> Then for me the following raising doesn't mean much.
> {mi viska lo plise noi xunre}
> {mi viska lo xunre}
>
> And of course lo plise = zo'e noi plise.
>
> (If we for the first time in our life see an orange we might call it {ti
> plise ga'a mi'a}, so {plise} is also a property).
>
> So I just can't see why Lojban is SAE.
SAE sensu stricto includes Romance, Germanic, and various other European
languages. SAE sensu lato includes, as far as I can see, all of Indo-European,
Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Semitic, and probably other families. Either way, it's
defined by properties of the language, not by belonging to certain families.
As far as I remember [sei u'i mi morji jenai vedli ;) ] the first written record in human history was a Sumerian record that said "A new divine Sun has appeared in the sky". We can assume that it was a supernova star (I don't remember in what constellation it is located now).
This is a funny fact because then the human written history starts with the fact of dealing with property language and actually extending unique objects to properties.
So what, Sumerian is also SAE and property-lang at the same time like English? What's the point?
That inhabitants of Tlon *had* to use only properties in their speech? But as I show everything can be seen as properties.
Lojban is definitely not SAE s.s. I think it is not SAE s.l. either, but
appears to be because most Lojbanists are native speakers of SAE languages. If
we raised Lojban speakers for whom e.g. "le blabi cu mlatu" or "se mlatu le
blabi" were no stranger a construction than "le mlatu cu blabi", Lojban as
they spoke it would not be SAE s.l.
I'm not sure I understand "things with holes and things to plug the holes",
but unlike all the language families I listed above, Lojban has no adjectives.
isn't NOI or even tanru adjectives?
Lojban does have nouns, but their use is severely restricted compared to SAE
languages, common nouns being generally expressed by verbs.
Really? You mean that only KOhA, {zo'e}, {da}, cmene etc. are nouns?
I've never had any problems with {lo ... ku} even though it is a derivation of zo'e + NOI.
brivla are always verbs. (mlatu = to-be-a-cat etc.)
> I have the following case unsolved:
> <quote>The classic contrast between an SAE language and a process one is
> the name of a wet spot in the Grand Canyon area. The Anglos call it
> Weeping Spring, a thing with a property. The Hopi call it Whiting
> Downward, a process.</quote>
>
> How to say "I'm near the whiting downward" in this language then?
> I guess in Lojban we can't say {mi jibni lo nu farlu}. How can i be near a
> process? I can only be near some atoms taking part in that process.
> How do the Hopi solve this problem?
I'd say it in Lojban "mi jibni le mo'ini'a blabi" (or "la mo'ini'a blabi"
since it's a name).
Exactly. But {le blabi} is a noun.
I don't know Hopi. I assume you do not mean "mo'ini'a
merlanu".
Yes, I want Hopi's solution, not lojbanic cheating.
On Monday, April 29, 2013 5:39:31 AM UTC+4, lojbab wrote:
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 loj...@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.