Another, simpler, question

["Mark E. Shoulson" <uunet!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!shoulson%CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

I've been away from my e-mail for a few days and returned to 70 pieces of
mail, so I suppose I should see if someone beat me to this, but I'm going
to answer anyway.

Dean Gahlon asks about alternate word-orders in Lojban:

Sample sentence:  le nanmu cu citka le cripu   (the man eats the bridge).

In Lojban, the order of sumti with respect to selbri is fairly free.  The
usual way of doing things is, as here, in "SVO" form (scare quotes because
it's not really applicable in Lojban): x1 place, then selbri, then
remaining sumti.  The other common form is "SOV" form: {le nanmu le cripu cu
citka}.  This is also fine.  Presumably, with many sumti, there's nothing
wrong with putting the selbri anywhere among them (but see below).  So, {mi
le briju cu klama le zdani} ("I to the-office go from the-nest") is OK,
too.

Using "VSO" form, {citka le nanmu le cripu}, is quite grammatical, but
poses a different problem.  By current usage, since VSO is not a common
word-order in many languages, the "selbri-first" word-order is reserved for
"observative" sentences--ones with the x1 place ellipsized.  Thus, the
above sentence would probably be understood to mean "(something) eats the
man ??? the bridge"--since "citka" only has 2 places, it would be unlear
how the bridge related to it all.

In private e-mail, jimc and I have discovered that we both would prefer to
allow VSO to enjoy the same treatment as anything else, making it more
consistent, as well as easier to use VSO (which we both seem to like).
What are everyone's opinions?

As to using {le cripu cu se citka le nanmu} (the "cu" is necessary here,
otherwise we get "the bridgish eaten-thing"); that's another bit of hairy
semantics.  I like to consider it quite the same as {le nanmu cu citka
le cripu}, but even I, like most others, often consider a SE-converted
selbri somehow to have a different semantic loading than an unconverted
one.  So, when I hear "se citka" I think "is-eaten", and thus would get a
different meaning for "le cripu cu se citka [zo'e]" as opposed to "[zo'e]
citka le cripu", even though both have the same brivla (citka), and the
same sumti ("zo'e" [elliptical "it"] in x1 (so to speak), and "le cripu" in
x2).

'Course, you may not have gotten up to this yet, but there are other ways
to mangle the word-order in a lojban predication.  There's selma'o FA,
which allows totally free reorginization (basically, the chief words in FA
are fa, fe, fi, fo, & fu, which mark the next following sumti as belonging
in the x1, x2, x3, x4, & x5 places of the current bridi, respectively.
Followinga FA-marked sumti, subsequent unmarked sumti are considered to
continue sequentially from the point specified by the FA.)  Needless to
say, this allows you to constuct truly confusing sentences, put more than
one sumti into the same place with no conjunction, etc.

Hope this clears things up.

~mark