From lee@piclab.com Wed Jan 30 10:48:56 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: lee@piclab.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 30 Jan 2002 18:48:56 -0000 Received: (qmail 30681 invoked from network); 30 Jan 2002 18:48:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.171) by m9.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 30 Jan 2002 18:48:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO piclab.com) (216.121.191.70) by mta3.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 30 Jan 2002 18:48:55 -0000 Received: from localhost (lcrocker@localhost) by piclab.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA28605; Wed, 30 Jan 2002 10:48:42 -0800 X-Authentication-Warning: piclab.com: lcrocker owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 10:48:40 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: lcrocker@piclab.com To: Adam Raizen Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com, John Cowan Subject: Re: [lojban] Bible translation style question In-Reply-To: <057a01c1a9b4$f3687080$90b4003e@default> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Lee Daniel Crocker X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=1436760 X-Yahoo-Profile: bowtie95841 > > People surely don't write "cumki fa le nu..." because it is > > short, but rather because they are calquing "It is necessary that > ..." > > Didn't someone mention sometime that moving complex clauses to the end > of the sentence is common cross-linguistically? There is a clear cognitive-science based reason to move such clauses to the end of an utterance in many contexts, and that's the short-term memory limitation. "The ball that I caught at the Giants' game Fred took me to is in my room" is awkward and hard to understand because "ball" and "in my room" are distant, requiring "ball" to be kept in memory until resolved. "In my room is the ball I caught at the..." solves that problem. This is clearly not an English thing, but a basic human brain thing, so I have no hesitation arranging Lojban sumti the same way for the same reason. -- Lee Daniel Crocker "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC