Subject: Re: [lojban] Bible translation style question

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 21:44:15 -0500

On Tuesday 29 January 2002 20:52, Craig wrote:
> to summarize the sporadic but relevant bits of Anthony Fox's _Linguistic
> Reconstruction: an Introduction to Theory and Method_: SVO languages are
> more likely to be prepositional; SOV tend to be postpositional. OV tend to
> be agglutinative, with (C)CV syllable structure, vowel harmony, and pitch
> accent, while VO tend to be inflecting. OV languages have adjectives before
> nouns, VO have them after. Verb-final languages will have a case system.
> This gives us the following for the two styles:
>
> Pro-SVO: prepositional (1)
> Anti-SVO: isolating, adjectives before nouns. (2)
> Pro-SOV: CCV syllables, adjectives before nouns. (2)
> Anti-SOV: prepositional, isolating, no pitch accent, no vowel harmony, no
> cases. (5)

What do you mean by "adjectives before nouns", since nouns in Lojban can't be 
modified by anything, and there is no such thing as an adjective? I suppose 
you are talking about a tanru, which is a compound verb, and saying that the 
modifier comes first. But this should be compared with other languages in 
which two verbs form a compound, or two nouns, not an adjective modifying a 
noun.

phma