Subject: Re: [lojban] Some remarks from a beginner

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 18:07:15 -0500

Others have answered in part, but let me add to the answers.

At 09:36 AM 01/12/2001 -0500, [email-masked] wrote:
>1) The idea of "place structure" is indeed a good one. But, e.g. in Latin,
>most of the
>litterature uses case-endings to emphasize some parts of a sentence (ifyou
>can read
>Latin, see Virgil or Cicero). This is not possible in Lojban without using
>place permutators
>(suvh as "te", "ve"...).

The words of selma'o BAI, several dozen of them, act somewhat as 
case-endings do in Romance languages, but are optional and almost never 
used for the standard places. As others have noted, there are several ways 
to rearrange the places of a predicate.

> You can argue that these particles are indeed
>equivalent to case
>endings (after all, Swahili puts its flexions on the beginning of words). How
>can you keep
>a "natural" structure? I mean, "focus" first, then the other parameters?

Focus first is not the only "natural" order, just the one common in 
European languages. A (uniquely?) Lojbanic way of expressing focus is the 
prenex, wherein you can identify the focus sumti, which then occurs 
whereever it may fall. This would be equivalent to the English "As to the 
market, John went to the market." where "the market" is the intended focus).

>2) The idea of a (potentially) four-dimensional referential seems nonsense to
>me, at least
>until mankind be able to time-travel.

It is of course "nonsense" or at least not particularly useful, but was an 
interesting side effect of the design that might have appeal to science 
fiction fans, so we discuss it.

>What about aspect, which is a purely timelike
>structure? With a 4D referential, you should have the notions of "beginning",
>"continuing"
>and "ending" in space as well as in time. Or you should treat time
>separately, as most
>human languages do.

Again, the nature of the design made it easy to treat time and space 
together and equivalently, so we do, which allows the possibility of 
"time-travel tenses". The use of aspect in space tenses works and has seen 
application in Lojban.

>3) I've been (pleasantly) striked by the fact that there are about 2,000
>gismu. It happens
>that *all* human languages have about this number of root words (e.g.
>Japanese have
>1,850 essential kanji). It seems to be true for almost every communication
>system,
>provided it can express enough concepts to convey an everyday life situation.
>This is
>not a remark, but a question : was this deliberately chosen, or is it a
>consequence of
>the "mankindness" of Lojban conceptors?

Actually there are only 1350 gismu. It is in part intentional in that some 
of the language designers felt that the number should be comparable to or 
smaller than the number of roots in most natural languages, and it was 
partially because that was the practical limit of what we had time and 
manpower to research in making the gismu list. The number has proven 
sufficient, so that very few words were added after the initial list was 
created (under 100 over several years).

>4) This *is* a criticism. I do *not* like Lojban's use (or, rather, un-use)
>of punctuation.
>Using the dot and comma as "letters" is indeed legitimate, from a phonetical
>point of
>view (Shaelian has only two punctuations, namely weak pause and strong
>pause). But
>it seems that Lojban has been designed to be spoken and heard, rather than
>read.

Linguistic theory assumes that spoken language is primary, and Lojban was 
originally designed for linguistics work. While in practice it is used 
mostly as a written language, the design requirement that sound and text 
match exactly puts considerable limits on what can be done with punctuation 
as a visual symbol. Specifically, any usage of punctuation has to be 
reflected in the words itself. Thus, as John Cowan said, you can put a 
question mark on a question, you must still mark the question with one of 
the question words. Likewise all other punctuations have corresponding 
words that MUST be used, whether or not their symbols appear.

> When
>reading, signs such as semicolon, colon, interrogation, and so on, do replace
>the
>mimics or intonation of the locutor.

Lojban has *no* intonation significance. You can read Lojban in an 
absolute monotone and it will not change the meaning in the least.

>Why not use them, even if unnecessary in spoken language?

They are not only unnecessary, but they are to some extent distracting if 
the listener is from a native language that uses different intonation rules 
than the speaker.

>You do not read written text letter-after-letter (or I hope you do
>not) : you normally grasp several lines at a glance, and then mentally 
>parse them.

Nobody has reached that skill level yet with Lojban, but we admit that the 
language was not designed for speed-reading.

> This
>is why line-
>or word- breaks are not a difficulty. In particular, i *do* hate this usage
>of ".i" to mark a
>strong pause.

I don't understand this criticism. The use of ".i" exactly corresponds to 
a period at the end of a sentence, except that the period in that word 
marks the start of the following sentence. Thus only at the end of a 
paragraph would there be no "period".

>b) It seems that Lojban's grammar is regularly updated (although it
>essentially remains
>the same). What is the way to be kept informed about these evolutions?

The grammar was first frozen in the early 1990s, though there were a few 
technical changes that cropped up when the reference grammar was being 
written. The language grammar was frozen in 1997 for a minimum of 5 years 
after all of the language definition books are published (and they have not 
yet all been published, so the effective baseline will be at least 10 years 
total).

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org