Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: place structure.

From: "James F. Carter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 10:00:26 -0700 (PDT)

On the other hand, in Lojban there are many more sumti tcita <BAI> 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
<PU>. 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 <BAI>-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 <BAI> 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 <BAI> 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: [email-masked] (finger for PGP key)
UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc

On Fri, 19 May 2000 [email-masked] 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.