Subject: Re: [lojban] Bible translation style question

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 13:03:55 EST

In a message dated 1/28/2002 8:55:39 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> That's a reasonable assumption, but objectionable. Lojban decided to adopt
> both the English-style 'case-marking by word-order' and the Japanese-style
> 'case-marking by adposition/particle', which leaves it up to users to 
> choose their preferred method. Us English-speakers with faltering Lojban 
> naturally
> prefer the English-like method, but this should not be at the cost of 
> making the Japanse-like method stylistically/discoursally marked.

Errh, you can't have it both ways: the Japanese system is inherently marked, 
since it requires the particles, whether they are place counters (displaced 
word-order) or contentful (BAI and the like). The fair thing, from your 
point of view would seem to be to require place markers for arguments even 
when in place and not allow unmarked sumti at all. Not likely!

And why is the assumption -- which has to underlie any dictionary: that the 
word order given is the normal word order -- objectionable? Some word order 
is going to be set, why not the publicly offered one?

<My concern is that where Lojban offers multiple ways
to say the same thing, and some ways are more SAE-like than others,
we have a natural tendency to go for the more SAE-like way -- it certainly 
facilitates communication. I just think that this natural tendency should not 
be elevated to the status of normative good style.>

Even if it clearly IS good style? Is being SAEish inherently antithetical to 
good Lojban style? I can't think of any reason to think this, but it seems 
to be the burden of your remarks -- and of xod's. As you have pointed out, 
several Lojban preferences are SAE and also commmon in many other language 
families (VSO is relatively rare, for example -- Loglan did not take it over 
from Logic because it created problems with various S-less sentence types. 
Even it requires only one additional syllable.)

I suppose that the point is that we don't want to use an SAE form simply 
because it is familiar and, since it is hard to prove that that wasn't why 
you used it, the safest bet for those that are concerned about such things is 
to use something radically non-SAE. But that often favors the strange and 
rare over the ordinary and common, even when there are good reasons why 
something is strange and rare (euphuistic for example, which is rare because 
it is gloriously inefficient and confusing).

Note please that none of this has anything to do with the Whorf hypothesis. 
It is not about position or particle or about word order or .... It is about 
fundamental syntactic types. Lojban may be somewhat SAEish even here, since 
it has things and their properties/activities, rather than Whorf's favorite 
Hopi-all verb language, but at least it got rid of the distinction among 
properties and activities somewhat