Subject: Re: [lojban] Why is there so much irregularity in cmavo/gismu?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 16:55:12 EST

In a message dated 11/13/2001 10:41:16 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> I think part of the problem is that Lojban has a much narrower definition
> of 'grammar' and 'grammatical' than is normal in linguistics and than is
> normally included within the 'grammar' of natural languages. This is not
> necessarily a Mistake, because an invented language is a different
> sort of creature from a natural language. At any rate, the role of a
> grammar is normally taken to be the rules that define a mapping from
> phonological structures to sentence meanings; the grammar generates
> all the well-formed sentences of the language, where sentences are
> defined as pairings between meanings and phonological forms.
> Lojban 'grammar' does something totally different: it defines a set
> of phonological strings and structurings of the words therein, but says 
> nothing about their meanings. Natural language simply has no
> analogue of this 'pseudogrammar'.
> 

While I agree that there are many questions about Lojban usage and meaning 
that are unresolved, I have to protest And's description -- and prescription 
-- on grammar. While his usage is not idiosyncratic, it is not nearly so 
universal as he would make it seem: still current phrases like 
"transformational grammar". "phrase structure grammar", "Montague grammar" 
and the like refer to things in the same class and role as Lojban grammar 
(with the difference that Lojban grammar, being prescriptive, actually does 
what it says it is to do). The most And can clearly say of Lojban is that it 
has only half of what an ideal grammar would have (which is 2/3 more than any 
other language has, by the way), a mapping between sound sequences and 
grammatical utterances. What is missing is the semantic component, from 
grammatical utterance to sentence meaning, where Lojban is not significantly 
better off than many ordinary langauges (except for having secure grammatical 
sentences) and may even be behind in some areas. Many grammarians would be 
seriously put out if parts of the sentence to meaning mechanism were 
incorporated into the sound to sentence mechanism, though, again, this is not 
a universal objection and several such combinations have enjoyed a measure of 
success over the last half-century (and some have been disasters, but so have 
some pure cases). In any event, "pseudogrammar" for Lojban's quite 
successful syntax is misleadingly denigrating, as though Lojban's situation 
were somehow different from -- and inferior to -- that of natural languages.