Subject: RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 16:11:18 +0100

>>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 09/24/01 02:04am 
#At 11:38 PM 9/23/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
#>I'm not clear what it is you want me to explain. To mark something as
#>topic is to indicate that it is the thing that the bridi is about. To
#>mark is as focus is to indicate that it is the key, centrally important
#>piece of information being conveyed by the bridi.
#
#OK, then bi'u/bi'unai is indeed the focus marker, since it marks the piece 
#of key information as being either new or old information. Just marking it 
#says that it is key, of course.

No and no. Marking something does not necessarily signal that it is key.
And bi'u(nai), marks any information as new/old, not just the key
piece. The main known use of bi'u(nai) is after "le", to render the
contrast between definite and indefinite "the"/"a", and it should be
clear to you that the the/a contrast in English has nothing to do with
focus.

#> > > But I
#> > >do think Lojban will be able to do this. I'm not sure how to do the
#> > >"What ... was ... hit" ("wh-cleft") versions in Lojban,
#> >
#> > But why must Lojban cleft things in the English manner?
#>
#>See above -- because that is what is closest to the logic/semantics of
#>focus, according to the very slender evidence available to me.
#
#Ya know, this is precisely why I DON'T want to put that sort of thing into 
#the languages. WE DON'T KNOW - all there is, is "slender evidence".  

Oh bollocks to that. First of all I said that the evidence available to me
is slender, not that the total evidence is slender. Second, there is at this
point no question of adding new grammatical structures to the language;
the question is how to use existing possibilities. And third, it's the only
decent suggestion to arise so far, given that bi'u and ba'e are wrong,
and kau, once upon a time a focus marker, has been subverted into
an indirect question marker.

#Well, the major goal of Loglan/Lojban from the beginning was to serve as a 
#linguistic test bed, in part to see just what was necessary in a language 
#in order to achieve full expressiveness. Doing it the same way as natural 
#language does is naturalistic, and not "logical".  

At a sufficiently deep level, natural language is logical, and logic is simply
an abstraction of natural language. The attraction of an invented logical
language is that that level becomes very shallow.

#The logical way of marking focus, if focus is an important feature of language, 
#is to ... *mark it*.  

You can't mark it if you don't know what it is -- the marking would be meaningless.
If focus is, logically, the abstraction of one constituent of a bridi so asto form an
equational statement, then the logicalists would want to reflect that in the
structure of lojban bridi.

And anyway, lojban marks other things 'structurally' rather than by attaching
cmavo. An example is quantifier scope -- an interesting example, because
several years ago we had big discussions about adding cmavo to mark scope
and the proposals fizzled out for lack of advocates.

--And.