Subject: [lojban] Re: cmavo for emphasis?

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 17:35:35 +0100

Jordan:
#On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 01:42:17PM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
#> Jay:
#> #On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 01:26:08AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
#> #> Viktoro [mailto:[email-masked]] 
#> #> > Are there particles for showing emphasis?
#> #> > 
#> #> > In English, we use a stronger voice to show emphasis in sentences 
#> #> > like:
#> #> > 
#> #> > "The *dog* bit the postman."
#> #> > 
#> #> > "The dog bit the *postman*."
#> #> > 
#> #> > "The dog *bit* the postman."
#> #> > 
#> #> > How does one indicate emphasis? By word order or what?
#> #
#> #ba'e before the word, in all these cases. Only And's third example
#> #would actually suggest emphasis to those using the language. The
#> #others appear as simply being contorted.
#> 
#> Whereas to speakers of natural languages the world over, the kind
#> of 'contortion' used in my examples is one of the most common strategies
#> of focus marking. 
#
#Thankfully it is not the strategy used by lojban, however. Neither
#is using a stronger voice.

I should backtrack/retract slightly. {ba'e} is indeed the mechanism
for adding emphasis, and not word order or the like. I (mis?)read between
the lines of what Viktoro was saying, and took him to be asking about
focus ("It was the dog (that) bit the postman", "It was the postman the
dog bit", "It was biting that the dog did to the postman"), and based
my response on that. As I recall, we discussed focus some time last
year, found that Lojban had no focalizer as such, and my 'contortions'
seemed the best strategy short of adding a new focalizing cmavo.
(Conceivably {kau} could be reclaimed as the focalizer it once was, 
but there are reasons for wanting not to do that.)

#> It must be remembered that "those using the language" are using it at
#> a level comparable to beginners level in natlangs, and without the
#> advantage of models of fluent 'native-like' usage to emulate.
#> Learning Lojban by emulating current usage is like going to learn
#> English in, say, a ghetto in London populated by people who have
#> immigrated from Kurdistan in the last five years.
#
#This is irrelevant. You can ignore ba'e if you want, but it is the
#*only* way to actually emph words. Varied word order will make
#people pay attention to different aspects of your sentence, but it
#doesn't allow for saying the same sentence with different emph (as
#the OP clearly wanted).

Yes about {ba'e} as the emphasis marker. But what I said wasn;t 
irrelevant. Viktor asked "how do we express this", I said how, and
Jay answered that users of the language wouldn't understand the
usage. In a sense I was arguing that Jay's point was irrelevant,
that what users will or won't understand doesn't tell us much
about Lojban.

--And.