From jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Fri May 19 10:00:27 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 28027 invoked from network); 19 May 2000 17:00:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 19 May 2000 17:00:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO bach.math.ucla.edu) (128.97.4.246) by mta2 with SMTP; 19 May 2000 17:00:26 -0000 Received: from simba.math.ucla.edu (root@simba.math.ucla.edu [128.97.4.125]) by bach.math.ucla.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA04002 for ; Fri, 19 May 2000 10:00:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jimc@localhost) by simba.math.ucla.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA00344 for ; Fri, 19 May 2000 10:00:26 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: simba.math.ucla.edu: jimc owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 10:00:26 -0700 (PDT) To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: place structure. In-Reply-To: <24.531b096.26565b5c@aol.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: "James F. Carter" On the other hand, in Lojban there are many more sumti tcita than in Loglan, such as ga'a (zgana, as observed by) or mu'u (mupli, for example), a total of 64 of them according to my notes, in addition to the tenses . They are etymologically and semantically closely related to particular gismu, and the effect of tagging a bridi with one of these prepositional phrases is pretty easy to predict regardless of the selbri (predicate) in the bridi. In addition, fi'o...[fe'u] allows any selbri to be used in a -type phrase. This is in contrast to natural languages where the meaning of the predefined cases (genitive, dative, ablative, etc.) has just enough regularity to confuse the learner, who ought to be just memorizing their use with each predicate individually. >From time to time in the past, the fashion has shifted between giving numbered places to "all" "essential" arguments of a gismu, versus letting the more outre' arguments be served by phrases. At the time of baselining the pendulum was stuck on the side that is not my favorite. Of course, the speaker is not required to use numbered places if his judgement of style suggests that a phrase would be better. James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu (finger for PGP key) UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc On Fri, 19 May 2000 pycyn@aol.com wrote: > ... > origin. In any case, it is a design principle of Loglan that memorizing even > a completely arbitrary set of predicate places would be easier than learning > bare predicates plus an indefinite set of preposition/cases and the ways that > they might combine.