4 ms·

Lojban would have been infinitely more promising if it didn't force you to memorize a completely arbitrary argument template for each root and instead used stan

Lojban would have been infinitely more promising if it didn't force you to memorize a completely arbitrary argument template for each root and instead used standardized semantic role prepositions (destination, agent, reason, instrument, etc.).

schoen 10y ago
There is an argument about that here: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system I think your position is more persuasive, although I've never argued about this with an expert Lojbanist. I speculate that overall they feel that (1) there could be dozens or hundreds of different cases reflecting the role that a noun plays in a particular predicate relationship, (2) most don't apply at all to any given selbri [predicate relationship], (3) [an argument made in this page] some people's feeling of which case is appropriate for describing a particular relationship is culturally arbitrary, as they differ significantly from natural language to natural language, and (4) they don't want to force the use of prepositions, for concision.
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  Even with "just" transitive verbs taking three arguments, it's easy to lose the plot in natural languages like English. The idea that it wouldn't happen in unmarked sentences with two more seems absurd to me. They found some natural relationships that happened to have five members and they had five vowels, so the whole FA series came from that. Also the SE series only seems speakable for se/te. Beyond that, I think it would be a head-scratcher in English. I also think even if people are getting fluent in Lojban, they're unlikely to be gracefully handling free word order scenarios where the selbri shows up not in position 2. Are there SOV-speakers producing SOV-ish shaped Lojban and everybody is getting along fine? If you look at the official cmavo list above, FA and SE account for five words each, so ten of the 1000 in the list. Of course, they're pretty productive as prefixes too, so more than that. But I think part of what makes it complex is that there are so many of everything... forethought and afterthought of all the connectives; differently typed connectives for combining sumti, selbri, bridi; the non-obligatory tense/aspect/mood system that accounts for probably at least 40 particles; etc. It's a neat language. There's a lot of neat stuff in it. I'm sure it's fun to be able to speak and understand it. I guess mainly I think it doesn't speak to your innate language facility's strengths, so I doubt it can be done realtime as a language, as specified. It can clearly be done with our reasoning faculties. Maybe that's enough.
  - schoen 10y ago
    I have a feeling that the things in Lojban that are semantically significant and super-hard to keep track of in real time in your head go pretty far beyond the noun case system. :-)
    - fusiongyro 10y ago
      I agree, but I feel like, if simple things are hard, what will hard things be like? :) Then again maybe with practice it becomes easier?

schoen 10y ago

There is an argument about that here: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Why_positional_case_system I think your position is more persuasive, although I've never argued about this with an expert Lojbanist. I speculate that overall they feel that (1) there could be dozens or hundreds of different cases reflecting the role that a noun plays in a particular predicate relationship, (2) most don't apply at all to any given selbri [predicate relationship], (3) [an argument made in this page] some people's feeling of which case is appropriate for describing a particular relationship is culturally arbitrary, as they differ significantly from natural language to natural language, and (4) they don't want to force the use of prepositions, for concision.

fusiongyro 10y ago
Even with "just" transitive verbs taking three arguments, it's easy to lose the plot in natural languages like English. The idea that it wouldn't happen in unmarked sentences with two more seems absurd to me. They found some natural relationships that happened to have five members and they had five vowels, so the whole FA series came from that. Also the SE series only seems speakable for se/te. Beyond that, I think it would be a head-scratcher in English. I also think even if people are getting fluent in Lojban, they're unlikely to be gracefully handling free word order scenarios where the selbri shows up not in position 2. Are there SOV-speakers producing SOV-ish shaped Lojban and everybody is getting along fine? If you look at the official cmavo list above, FA and SE account for five words each, so ten of the 1000 in the list. Of course, they're pretty productive as prefixes too, so more than that. But I think part of what makes it complex is that there are so many of everything... forethought and afterthought of all the connectives; differently typed connectives for combining sumti, selbri, bridi; the non-obligatory tense/aspect/mood system that accounts for probably at least 40 particles; etc. It's a neat language. There's a lot of neat stuff in it. I'm sure it's fun to be able to speak and understand it. I guess mainly I think it doesn't speak to your innate language facility's strengths, so I doubt it can be done realtime as a language, as specified. It can clearly be done with our reasoning faculties. Maybe that's enough.
- schoen 10y ago
  I have a feeling that the things in Lojban that are semantically significant and super-hard to keep track of in real time in your head go pretty far beyond the noun case system. :-)
  - fusiongyro 10y ago
    I agree, but I feel like, if simple things are hard, what will hard things be like? :) Then again maybe with practice it becomes easier?