Subject: _Rose_ is a rose is a rose

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 15:32:32 EDT

The way I heard it comes out to {le nu la Roz. rozgu cu rozgu}, not that 
makes any more sense.

But I am worried about the talk of nouns and verbs (and adjectives and...) in 
connection with Lojban. There is only one main syntactic class in Lojban and 
two minor ones. Predicates refer to relations among relata and most relata 
are identified by their standing in various relations. For some relata 
there are also cmene, which refer to relata independently of the relations 
they may enter into (other than that of being called by the cmene). The 
other minor grammatical category is cmavo, which can be subdivided into many 
small groups that perform any number of syntactic functions and occasionally 
even a content one, but do not classify relata further.

Now some predicates translate into English naturally as nouns, others as 
verbs, others as adjectives, and so on. What we learned from the bottle 
question (better, are learning, since some questions still remain) is that 
these translations can be misleading, sometimes even in crucial ways. 
Against that, we are advised to translate against type as a reminder that 
Lojban words do not have the same presuppositions and implications as their 
English counterparts. Beyond this warning, the alternate translations are 
not better than the natural ones, since they too introduce presuppositions 
and implications that are alien to the Lojban -- and leave out items that are 
crucial to it. In particular, it does not mean that the Lojban words we 
thought of as nouns are really verbs, etc. They are all really predicates, 
none of them are nouns or verbs.

Whorf, working on the cusp between classical linguistics (describe by 
figuring how to say it in Latin) and positivistic descriptive linguistics but 
sure that the former was wrong, carries over from the former a 
translinguistic notion of what a verb is (and a noun and a...) and so can say 
that every word (even names) are verbs in whatever (Nootka?). But, if the 
claim were true, it would be false since a language with only verbs would 
have no verbs at all -- since it has not nouns or adjectives or whatever to 
contrast with them. On his clear days, BL does manage to unpack some of 
these claims to say that most words refer to processes or eddies of events 
rather than to objects and their attributes. If that were what "verb" meant 
-- which it is not, obviously, in any known language -- then some Lojban 
predicates would be verbs and others (the ones that referred to stable 
objects) would be nouns, or at least would be more like the one than the 
other. But in fact it is unclear what kinds of things Lojban predicates 
refer to: predicates are interchangeable grammatically except for number of 
places (not taken to be substantially significant), so all refer to enduring 
things, events, relations, etc., since some clearly do. I don't see 
anything in Lojban incompatible with the most strict Aristotelian or 
Platonist or monistic processist (as Whorf often seems to be -- when he is 
not a nihilistic processist) -- but alos nothing that comples our 
metaphysics toward any one of these. Even the abstractors that we names as 
quality or process or ... are not tied -- except in our understanding of them 
-- to some preset notion of qualities nor processes nor... The experiment 
with Lojban is, in part to see what does come out of speaking it, not to 
build into it some notions we already have of what should emerge.