Subject: Re: [lojban] Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 09:12:01 +0300

Jorge Llambias wrote:
> la ivAn cusku di'e
> >Jorge Llambias wrote:
> > > Only one-place predicates can be of classes (1) and (2). All
> > > others must be of class (3), because they don't refer to a
> > > property or bundle of properties but always to relationships.
> >
> >But so do many of the natlangs' nouns and adjectives. What about
> >such relationships as `father', `friend', `part/piece'? [...]
> 
> Yes, those I would expect to be class (3) as well. And so are
> things like "under", "behind", "after", "between", and so on.
> These are certainly not empty words even though they aren't
> adjectives, nouns or verbs in English.

It is interesting that I can think of many languages in which such
concepts are nouns (Japanese), and some where they are adjectives
(Egyptian), but none where they are verbs -- though they can easily
be parts of verbs (preverbs in Kabardian, say, where you literally
under-stand a tree).

> What I wanted to stress was that Lojban has a very strong
> slant towards class (3) words. Indeed the few class (2) words
> that Lojban has seem a bit out of place, like {sfofa}.

I hadn't realised we had a gismu for `sofa'. Is it such a fundamental
concept? How many of the source lgs have a home-made word for it?

Yes, Lojban does have a slant for arities greater than one.
To my mind, however, the main thing is not the arity, but rather
the ability of the word to be an argument, an attribute or a
predicate; or if its ability is not an issue, then the likelihood
of its being one of those things. {le mlatu cu pinxe le ladru}
sounds more plausible to me than {le xekri cu pinxe le blabi},
although both may be equally unambiguous descriptions of the same
situation.

> >We want to name entities [...] by stating (the) categories
> >to which they belong. Thus a bottle is not a bottle because
> >it actually or potentially bottles something; it is a bottle
> >because it is a vessel with a narrow neck.
> 
> Right, but we don't have in Lojban a word for the vessel with
> a narrow neck, the closest thing we have is a word for the
> relationship that such vessels tend to have with other usually
> liquid objects.

Yes, -- and that is a rather unexpected state of affairs. {sfofa}
too could be a bin- (or more) -ary predicate (`x1 is a sofa sat on
by x2 ...'), but it isn't. Nor is {dakfu} `... knife cutting x2'.
Bottles seem to be singled out.

--Ivan