Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page

From: PILCH Hartmut <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 09:19:57 +0000 (/etc/localtime)

> > >There are other examples of silly centrifugal order in German,
> > >e.g. "S 828 BGB", which is just an abbreviation for something
> > >like "Section 828 of the Civil Law".
> 
> "S 828 BGB" actually looks extremely unGerman: if there is anything
> that the German language (and in particular its scholarly style) are
> notorious for, it is their long centripetal compounds that Mark Twain
> had such a hard time with.

centripetal compounds are just as long in English, but they are not
accented at the beginning. In German writing compounds together is a way
of indicating where the accented beginning is. On the whole, the
centripetal (tanru) model is less pervasive in German than in English.

> > >Nobody can argue that it suits human thinking well to first
> > >dive down into a section and then look up and see what body
> > >of law we are talking about.
> 
> Certainly not. Otoh, that form can be handy if the hearer is very
> likely to already know which body of law is being talked about.
> Which is just the case with dates of {lo zi fasnu}.

Even there I don't find it handy. If I already know that we are talking
about BGB, then "S 828" is enough. Otherwise prepending works just as
well, and it never hurts.

When I read addresses like "S 828 BGB" or "20.5.1999", I find that I have
to mentally transpose them before I can adequately process (e.g. compare,
memorise etc) them in my mind. The centripetal form is mnemotechnically
superior imho. Mnemotechnical requirements are quite similar to computing
requirements. This is what I meant by saying that URLs are "human
language". They are made in view human mnemotechnical needs, while IP
addresses are not.

> > I agree that they probably evolved out of the language's grammar pattern,
> > but you persist is seeing tanru as the more basic grammar pattern of
> > Lojban, and dates as being tanru, whereas the basic unambiguous structure
> > is the restrictive clause/phrase, or the added specified place on a
> > predicate [...]. Both of these tend to be added to the end in Lojban [...].
> 
> That may be because of the structural difference between tanru and
> phrases containing restrictive clauses: in the former the components
> are simply juxtaposed, whereas the latter employ special connectives.
> Since what cmavo (in lojban) or punctuation (elsewhere) appears between
> the numbers in dates serves only to separate them, they do end up
> looking more like tanru.
> 
> That is, `05/09' looks more like `gold ring' than `ring of gold',
> because the slash is more like a space than like the preposition
> `of' -- all it does is separate the digits.

Also, all addresses can be very well represented as tanrus, and this is
likely to occur in conversation

day 4 . 
which day 4 ?
month 5 day 4 . 
which month 5 day 4 ?
year 1999 month 5 day 4 .

In Lojban the default way of doing this is tanru expansion, with a special
particle 'be' available for transposition.

I have not seen any description of a Lojban grammar for address
expressions, and I also don't know how to express the naming relation
between "day" and "4". It needn't bee a naming relation, it can also be a
ordinal relation like "4th day". Or a diffuse relation like "4 day" as in
Chinese "si4 ri4". Diffuse relations (freedom from specificness
requirements that are not caused by the idea one wants to convey but by
the constraints of the language system) seem most Lojbanic to me.

-phm