Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:08:51 -0600 (MDT)

On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, And Rosta wrote:

> Off the top of my head, here's an inexhaustive list of what I think
> unnatural:
>
> * the syntactic structure assigned by the yacc grammar
> * terminators

Many natural languages can be approximated by unambiguous context-free
grammars. Even more languages can be handled by ambiguous ones. So a
LALR(1) grammar doesn't seem strange, just unlikely to occur naturally.

> * MEX

I wouldn't be surprised if something similar evolved in languages if
talking about math were a significantly more important part of the lives
of all speakers.

> * the complexity of Tense, and aspects of its semantics

It seems a lot easier than conjugating Latin was in high school! :)

> * semantically arbitrary place structures

They don't seem to be arbitrary to me (at least not the order). Seems as
though they're all the most frequently used things which might be related
to each other.

> * SE

Sort of unfair to list it as its own thing, as its merely a side effect of
the place structure.

> * SI/SA/SU

Hey. Natural languages have ways to indicate that you just made a mistake.
They're not as explicit in the amount of mistake you made, but they're
there.

> * go'e go'o nei no'a

That seems like a somewhat arbitrary list of anaphora to claim unnatural.
What about go'i or ri?

> * LAU

s/LAU/lerfu/

And again, lerfu just make explicit something already in existance.

> I don't think Lojban will test whether a putatative universal is
> genuine, because these universals pertain to natural language, and
> Lojban won't be a natural language until it is acquired as a
> native tongue.

Geesh, you say that like it won't ever happen.

- Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose