I agree with the dot instead of the hyphen after "carried" (but not the
URL insert, which I am pretty sure you did not intend).
Indeed, I did not.
> I like my idea of e.g. VPZ .... VPT because abbreviations like VP are
> already widely understood among English-speaking linguists and the
> -Z...-T convention (or something like it) can be used to convey the
> not-widely-understood functions of these Lojban particles, which IMHO
> ought to be one of the points of writing the gloss in the first place.
The latter would seem to be the key issue. Why are we writing the
gloss?
I am not sure what Pierre had in mind, but I responded mainly because it just seemed like a fun challenge to gloss a simple example sentence. FYI, in case there was any possible confusion, maybe I should mention that I have no intention of actually working out a system for Lojban that maximally conforms to the Leipzig glossing rules, complete with abbreviations and "-ive"-suffixed terminology for all the BAI and UI and stuff like that which you mention later.
The most usual reason for writing a gloss is to clarify what is
going on for the reader. The reader in this case is almost always a
Lojban learner and not an "English-speaking linguist" where the latter
word refers to the academic professional field rather than the
learner-of-languages. Most learners don't know the "widely-understood"
abbreviations, nor the technical terms they represent. Looking at the
wikipedia list of abbreviations (
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations> ), I
didn't recognize most of the terms they represent, and I did a
personal-if-amateur study of Comrie's linguistic universals work early
in my Lojban designing effort. I see no particular advantage in using
words that most people don't know, and especially if we are using them
in ways that only approximate the technical meaning.
I agree that many of those abbreviations would be out of place in learning materials, but (as you indicate later) they might not be out of place in an academic paper that dealt with Lojban, if such a paper were written (I seem to recall at least one such paper being written a long time ago by N. Nicholas).
I thus favor for teaching the language, the introduction of standard
terminology that is specific to the Lojban design, and is not beholden
to academic linguistic norms that learners likely won't know, and
academics would be prone to quibble with (and indeed academics DID
quibble with a lot of the usages that I made, and even more that JCB
made in the original Loglan design).
No matter what approach you take, the learner will need to do some learning. As an English-speaking learner, I would order my preferences in terminology like this:
Use an English term in a conventional way > Use a neologism or Lojban term > Use an English term in an unconventional way > Use an English term in a bizarre way (e.g. "modal").
That is why brivla, bridi, selma'o (and their various capitalized names)
are used in Lojban documentation. We don't need to argue whether a BAI
is a modal, or an adverb, or a preposition. It is serving the Lojban
grammatical function of a BAI, which possibly might be any of those
terms in some context that an academic linguist might quibble with. (I
am reminded of JCB's example which in Lojban is raumoi "enough.th" as an
ordinal number). Similarly many of the members of UI could be assigned
to specific abbreviations on the list of the "-ive" variety, but in
studying Lojban probably one should simply view them as UI for
grammatical explanation, or possibly one of several categories of UI
(which in my baseline cmavo lists are shown as UI1 (attitudinals), UI2
(evidentials), UI4 (emotion aspects). UI7 (emotion contours), etc.
Of course when writing for the academic linguistic world, the gloss
needs to conform to academic norms such as the "Leipzig rules" for
morphemic glossing (see the google search I referenced to find these).
But in such cases, I think the person writing the paper should be
clarifying the abbreviations being used and what they are actually
representing in Lojban that might not apply to other languages. Makes a
lot more sense than a huge chunk of the abbreviations in the standard
list that are defined solely by how they are used in a couple of
specific languages e,g, "adessive", "antessive". And then there are
terms like "classifier" which Pierre just quibbled on as applying only
to how things are counted. The wikipedia definition is more generic and
it would definite include bic- as a classifier morpheme, which is in
fact what it was designed to be, after the fashion of the Dyirbal
classes described in
<https://en.wikipedia.org>/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things,
except that Lojban doesn't have "noun classes" (
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class> ) since it doesn't have nouns
- just brivla which might serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and in some
forms adverbs, and a bunch of other things. I would argue that
"classifier" is the right linguistics term, based on
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)> which states
"Languages with classifiers may have up to several hundred different
classifiers, whereas those with noun classes (or in particular, genders)
tend to have a smaller number of classes, not always much dependent on
the nouns' meaning, and with a variety of grammatical consequences."
Lojban Type.III.fu'ivla prefixes can be any of the rafsi (affixes) and
are highly dependent on the brivla's "meaning" and with no grammatical
consequences, and thus "noun class" would be the wrong term even if that
was what actually inspired the design element (there were other
considerations besides that book that led to this sort of classifier in
Type.III.fu'ivla, most especially the efforts in creating words for
Linnean terms and chemical element names, both of which JCB had tackled
in Loglan with poor solutions, but Lakoff's book was much talked about
at the time).
As a learner, my way of thinking is like this:
- "brivla" is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stands as either a noun, a verb, or a modifier of another brivla depending on its position in syntax.
- "BAI" is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stands as either an adverbial preposition or an adverb depending on position in syntax.
- And so on.
So while some of Lojban syntax is definitely odd in certain details (e.g. the terminators), I think much of Lojban can be understood and described in conventional linguistic terms, and that it's helpful to the learner to do so.
Regarding "classifier", the WP articles use the term in the narrow sense of counter-word (for countables) as specifically used in Chinese and languages with similar systems; according to WP, even a measure-word (for non-countables) is a different thing. But WP is not always right and I believe that somewhere or other I have seen "classifier" also used in a much more broad sense to include any word or morpheme that indicates a noun class, though perhaps I am mis-remembering. At any rate, IMHO, the idea is close enough that type-3 rafsi-prefixes can reasonably be called "classifiers" without a lot of confusion. So I think we agree on that. (Also: the CLL uses "classifier" for rafsi-prefixes at least once.)
> You can use dots to add features to a gloss. French "la" might be
> glossed as ART.DEF.FEM and Lojban "loi" might be ART.MASS.
It might, *but* I think that would be an incorrect choice. The use of
capitalized terms are supposed to be about referencing grammatical
concepts and effects, and not content concepts.
For clarity and extra information, it is possible to provide two lines of "morphatim" glossing, the upper line using an all-caps abbreviation, and the lower line providing a plainer English translation.
mi nelci la .lojban.
1.SG BRIVLA ART.PROPER CMEVLA
I/me like 0 Lojban.
"I like Lojban"
Arguably, all of the
members of selma'o LE are simply articles, and which flavor of article
has utterly no grammatical effect, UI and BAI and PA would also be
grammatical categories that in theory have no grammatical effect, and I
only favor sub-categorizing them (with numbers after the selma'o)
because in actual usage, attitudinals, evidentials, contours, etc have
distinctly different effects on meaning even while having the same
nominal grammar, and those sub-categories are useful in explaining
actual usage in Lojban to a learner (or perhaps a linguist), whereas the
various "-ive" linguistic terms in the standard list that might be
applied only to individual cmavo would imply grammatical functionality
that isn't part of the language (e.g. "fa'a" which I think corresponds
to "adessive or venitive case" but in fact has nothing to do with
linguistic "case", and is two linguistic terms covering something that
is only one cmavo in a set having real grammatical value (selma'o FAhA),
because they combine in a grammatically predictable way with MOhI, where
I suspect there are no standard terms for most of the other members of
FAhA that have identical grammar but are not adessive, and nothing so
far as I know that can describe MOhI).
Loglan/Lojban was designed by intent to be extreme linguistically with
respect to many language norms that are mandatory in some languages
while being ignored in other languages. People know about number and
tense as being important parts of Lojban's elimination of mandatory
features, but equally important are these other lesser known features
that are also non-mandatory, but are permitted (even though they may
have no clear correspondence in the speakers native language, hence
things like our aorist-like tenses (ZAhO), evidentials, etc.)
How much a language speaker comes to use these categories in Lojban that
are not used in their native languages, and to what effect, is clearly
part of the realm implied by the Sapir-Whorf testing aspect of
Loglan/Lojban. I have frequently said that Lojban's enormous and highly
flexible attitudinal system might show more in the way of Sapir-Whorf
effects than the features of the original Loglan design (formal logical
connectives, logical predicate brivla, uniquely parsible "metaphoric"
modification). TLI Loglan lacks that enormity and flexibility in its
corresponding set.
And the features that might make a difference in forms of usage are the
ones linguists SHOULD be interested in when trying to understand how
Lojban grammar works. For that reason, the use of selma'o names with
subcategory numbers where applicable is far better than the use of
standard terminology, and also has the benefit of being more
understandable to the layperson who doesn't know the linguistic jargon.
Actually, I think it could be useful to insert another line of glossing that shows the selma'o (we are not limited to using one or two lines), thereby providing additional information. However, I think it defeats the purpose of glossing not to also provide English, and not to provide relatively clear and precise glosses of what things mean (whether abbreviations or short translations or both), and how the sentence meaning is composed (not just its abstract syntax).
On the other hand, I once proposed to some academic linguists the use of
Lojban as itself a form of linguistic jargon interlanguage for conveying
glosses of other languages and respecting their features. Lojban in
effect has a superset of most of the features of pretty much all other
languages, even if they aren't conveyed via mandatory grammatical
features in Lojban. Thus Lojban can convey the complexity of a Nootka
sentence/word as a Lojban tanru or even a many-part lujvo, as well as
the variety of cases in the Finno-Ugric languages. Using the terms
invented to describe these features in academic descriptions of those
languages limits one to an audience of those who know the language
enough to understand the terms. Lojban as an interlanguage loses
information about what is conveyed via grammar words vs via content
words in the source language, but might be more effective in conveying
the semantics that result.
Enough for now. I've essentially denigrated the purpose of Pierre's
original question, which was not what I started trying to do in
answering him. But it has been a long while since a question came up
here that strongly ties back to the original design concepts of the
language, as well as Loglan/Lojban's ties, both positive and negative,
to the academic linguistic community (which for the most part haven't
had much respect for artificial languages, though I'm not in tune enough
to know whether the attitudes of academic linguistics might have changed
since the 80s when Lojban was designed).
I enjoyed the read and appreciate the thoughts and exposition of your design philosophy!
mi'e .maik.
mu'o.