Subject: Re: Why place structure?

From: "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 20:51:21 -0000

--- In [email-masked], pycyn@a... wrote:
> In a message dated 00-10-05 23:01:01 EDT, daishin writes:

> But I felt that the "place-structure" is quite difficult
> to memory and use. 

> << (3) What is the advantage of the "place-structure,"

Although once myself programming in a language of type "predicate
logic" (Prolog), I'm still having my difficulties with the Lojban 
system of place structures one has to memorize along with each single
brivla. Yet, since the morphology of gismu (IMHO the 
"kernel" of Lojban) being given, there is hardly a way to alter the
place structure to be more "predictable".

I do not conceal that I'm pretty fond of Rick Morneau's (see at
http://www.srv.net/~ram/essays.html with furter links) pretty 
straightforward concepts.
Since "some" time ;-), I'm dealing with his huge draft on "The
Lexical Semantics of a Machine Translation Interlingua" which is 
based on his ideas of the different "case roles" capable to be
expressed in the "valency" of different kinds of verbs: 
he (in quite "natural" and intuitive way) classifies verbs' valencies
(place structures) according "agent", "patient", "focus" etc. as 
different kinds, e.g. P-d (the window broke), A/P-d (John broke the
window), A/P-s (He kept the door open), P/F-s (the boy 
wanted the money), AP/F-s (John looked at the mouse), P/F-d (John
noticed the mouse) etc. etc. - or just P-s (She's beautiful).
Due to this concept, he proposes the special structure of each verb
being designed according to its type of valency respective by 
adding special prefixes to the root, thus unambiguiously
determinating each verb (and creating a whole bunch of related 
expressions - as I see it, in a still more powerful way than with
gismu or lujvo place conversion in Lojban.
I don't miss realizing that Morneau's concept is pretty close to
African (Bantu type) languages - yet, that must not at all be a draw-
back, the more since the pronounceability - to me - seems pretty easy
(that of many lujvo or even fu'ivla doesn't at all!).

.aulun.