Subject: Re: [lojban] Why place structure?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 10:24:38 EDT

In a message dated 00-10-05 23:01:01 EDT, daishin writes:

<< 
Hello(coi), I read some WWW-pages about Lojban,
and I am interested in.
But I felt that the "place-structure" is quite difficult
to memory and use. For example, there is a sentence
mi jbena de'i li pamupi'ebi --- (A) (I was born in 15/8)
in "A Lojban Beginners' Course" (Robin Turner)
http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin/lesson5.html

But according to the gismu list, the place structure of "jbena" is:
x1 is born to x2 at time x3 [birthday] and place x4 [birthplace]

So I think that one can say:
mi jbena zo'e li pamupi'ebi --- (B)

My questions are:
(1) Which is better, (A) or (B) ?>>
Well, I prefer B, or even {mi jbena fi li pamupi'ebi}; if you have a place 
in the predicate, use it. The alternative is strictly redundant: "I was 
born to someone on some day at some place on day 15/8"

<<(2) Do we have to memory the place structure of "jbena"
and all the other gismu ?>>
Yes, but once you do start to use them, they tend to stick in memory. It is 
not easy at first, but it is possible. And, at least for now, you can look 
it up. We do need some better aids for this than the raw memorization that 
we now mainly work with.

<< (3) What is the advantage of the "place-structure," which is
not so often appear in other natural/artificial languages?>>
I'm not sure that it is an advantage, just a choice amongst a variety of 
options. In this case, the choice was determined by the underlying language 
scheme: symbolic logic, which has predicates defined with place structure, 
but not additional means of attaching arguments. Lojban, realistically, 
provided those additional means as well (strictly, means of creating new 
arguments with new place structures from old ones). As for place structures 
being uncommon, they are very common, though rather restricted. Almost every 
language I can think of has some place structure with some of its predicates, 
that is, situations where you can tell the function of a term in a sentence 
only by where it occurs in the sentence. English is perhaps an extreme case, 
regularly using place for subject, direct object, and often indirect object 
(their exact functions depending on the verb involved). Am I right in 
remembering that Japanese goes rather in the other direction and regularly 
flags all of these functions? But even then it places the expressions in a 
certain order in most cases. Anyhow, the form used in the symbolism of Logic 
was not created out of thin air, but was bsed upon the langauges the 
logicians spoke (albeit rather loosely). 
>|83 pc