Subject: Re: [lojban] Englishistic

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 15:28:02 +0300

Invent Yourself wrote:
> 
> All these intense discussions of the intricacies of Lojban grammar
> occur in English. I wonder how different they would be were they
> conducted in a different natural language!

One might also wonder how many of them would've been initiated
in the first place. Yes, a very interesting question.

The set of terms of the `still/already' family is generally similar
in the main European lgs, but the details differ. Were we speaking
German or French, we would be concerned about the rendering of the
difference between _noch_ and _noch immer_ (_encore_ and _toujours_,
_még_ and __még mindig_ in Hungarian, etc.), among other things.

Spanish is very similar to English; but three of the six source lgs
have very rudimentary tense systems, and in those it is reasonable
to expect that even if there are `still/already' terms, they will
differ from the English ones in that they will be used for things
that are expressed in English by mere tense distinctions. This is
in fact the case in Russian, where _uzhe_ `already' + past tense
often does the job of a past perfect tense. But in Arabic `still'
is expressed preiphrastically: <lA yazAlu nA'imaN> `he is still
sleeping', lit. `he doesn't cease sleeping'; cf. Spanish _sigue
durmiendo_ `he continues sleeping' in the same sense.

Chinese dictionaries gloss `still' as _hai2_ and `already'
as _yi3jing_, but then there are also the sentence-final
particles _ne_ and _le_, and adverb and particle can be
used together, so the entire picture isn't much like English.

And Hindi doesn't have words for `still' or `already' at all; either
one can sort of be expressed by <abhI> `even now', or one says eg
<wah jA cukA hai> `he's finished going' for `he is/has gone already'.

--Ivan