Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 22:02:26 -0600 (MDT)

On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Invent Yourself wrote:

> > > * Natlang syntax doesn't have terminators (AFAIK)
> >
> > They'd probably be significantly less ambiguous if they did.
>
> "unquote" is a terminator. Are you sure there are no more?

I'm sure there are prosadic cues which indicate the end of phrase
boundries. I don't know a whole lot of prosady, though.

Maybe Lojban has merely moved them from being prosodic to more obvious
(and ASCII-representable) positions?

> Yes, unfair to mention SE, fair to mention place structures. Or are there
> any langs with them? What about this Thompson language, spoken by ~500
> Canadian Native Americans, said to be the only language that's a little
> similar to Lojban in structure? Was that a joke? I can find no information
> about that language except its existence, using the net.

Most native american languages are very agglutinating, whereas Lojban is
very isolating. I suppose that doesn't really stop it from being similar
in some bizarre way, though.

> More than kids, the house in which they raised must be an all-Lojban house
> (best), or second best is that one parent always uses Lojban, while the
> other parent uses something else.

I'm pretty sure it is possible for children to become fluent even with
exposure only though, say, the grandparents, who aren't around all the
time. (There ought to be cases of this with bilingual english/spanish
hispanic families.)

Sigh. I've really been meaning to read up on childhood language
acquisition.

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