From araizen@newmail.net Wed May 10 13:10:07 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 10863 invoked from network); 10 May 2000 20:10:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 10 May 2000 20:10:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO out.newmail.net) (212.150.51.26) by mta1 with SMTP; 10 May 2000 20:10:03 -0000 Received: from default ([62.0.167.87]) by out.newmail.net ; Wed, 10 May 2000 23:11:16 +02:00 To: lojban@egroups.com Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 23:14:35 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Order of elements Reply-to: araizen@newmail.net Priority: normal X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.11) Message-ID: <95802547601@out.newmail.net> From: "Adam Raizen" Concerning the order of grammatical components (and thus perhaps dates), I find it interesting that Lojban is rather idiosyncratic among human languages, and that its idiosyncrasies just happen (purely coincidencidentally, no doubt) to correspond to English's idiosyncrasies. There's no doubt that Lojban is a Subject- Verb-Object language (like English), and thus, as expected, relative clauses tend follow the sumti, and Lojban has prepositions and not postpositions, just as in English. On the other hand, adjectives/seltau normally precede the tertau, and most people seem to put possessives before the noun/sumti, again as in English (and strange for a VO language). Lojban can of course vary this order more easily than English, though. Probably either date format can be defended based on the structure of the rest of the grammar. co'o mi'e adam