From a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Fri Sep 27 16:41:06 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_1_1_4); 27 Sep 2002 23:41:05 -0000 Received: (qmail 67767 invoked from network); 27 Sep 2002 23:41:05 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 27 Sep 2002 23:41:05 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mailbox-13.st1.spray.net) (212.78.202.113) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 27 Sep 2002 23:41:05 -0000 Received: from oemcomputer (host213-121-67-49.surfport24.v21.co.uk [213.121.67.49]) by mailbox-13.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 598293ED5F; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 01:41:03 +0200 (DST) To: "John Cowan" Cc: Subject: RE: [lojban] Re: interactions between tenses, other tenses, and NA Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 00:42:40 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <200209272023.QAA29266@mail2.reutershealth.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=122260811 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin John: > And Rosta scripsit: > > > To me it seems one of the more naturalistic features of Lojban -- > > a quirky, exceptional, counterintuitive, unnecessary complication, > > of the sort natlangs are full of & Lojban is largely free of. > > What is alien is that a contradictory negation particle should be other > than at the beginning of the sentence. > > In Loglan, sentence-initial "no" served this function. IIRC, Lojbab > consciously moved it from the natural sentence-initial position to just > before the selbri "because it was more naturalistic". IMHO a mistake. As is obvious, I agree that the decision was a terrible mistake, but the idea that "it was more naturalistic" is fairly defensible, given that (a) some lects of English have it, and (b) quirkiness, exception-riddenness, counterintuiveness and unnecessary complication is highly characteristic of natlangs, as evidenced by the way that more accomplished naturalistic artlangers deliberately try to add it to their conlangs. --And.