Subject: Re: [lojban] Bible translation style question

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 14:06:55 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

> > > 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.

Are there any languages that do things the "wrong" way, or is this a
universal?

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