Subject: RE: [lojban] observatives (was RE: a construal of lo'e & le'e

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 22:00:54 -0500

At 09:19 PM 10/28/01 -0500, Craig wrote:
> >Not a "rule" per se, but a convention, just as the "story-time" convention
> >applies to interpreting the tense of most instances of consecutive
> >sentences. There are other possible uses for ellipsis x1 besides an
> >observative, but that is the one most likely. Note that it is ellipsis in
> >x1 that marks the observative, and not explicit zo'e in x1. Part of the
> >magic of the convention is the pragmatic emphasis on the selbri caused by
> >fronting it.
>
>How incredibly culturally biased. Why not emphasize by moving it to the
>BACK, so that it is fresh in the mind as context for the next bridi? Both
>ways are equally valid, why do you assume that one is just how it is to be
>done? The 'pragmatic emphasis' works both ways, in my experience, so "le
>gerku cu blanu"'s only flaw is its wordiness.

Not culturally biased - linguistically biased. One way of emphasizing the 
importance of a part of a word is by moving it to either end, generally the 
front, if it is critical information needed now (generally the case for an 
observative), or the end, if it has secondary or non-immediate 
importance. An observative does not presume that there will be any 
following bridi, so it would be foolish to design around the non-universal 
case.

Of course the bottom line is that in TLI Loglan there was an explicit 
debate between interpreting a bare predicate as a command or an observative 
("Fire!" said to soldiers of an execution squad, vs. on seeing smoke and 
flame). JCB chose one way; we reversed that decision. Other ways of 
showing the observative were not considered, except to reject the lone 
sumti version, which seemed horribly flawed.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org