Subject: Re: [lojban] Bible translation style question

From: Lee Daniel Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 10:48:40 -0800 (PST)

> > 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 <[email-masked]> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"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