Re: Lojbab on subject/object

[cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc]

John Cowan's analysis of .and. rostas's response to ... on subject/object
was very interesting and insightful.

.and.:
> > Lojban, it may be seen, liking to eat its cake and have it, kills
> > both birds with several stones! Is it the 'Lojban way', that if
> > there are several solutions to a problem then all are adopted?

John:
> In general, yes.  Sometimes one is more highly marked (needs more particles
> than the other)...

Whereas a big goal in -gua!spi is maximal simplicity.  The reason,
according to Lojbab, for "kill two birds with many stones" is that
particular mechanisms are known to be useful in various natural
languages for expressing the things speakers want to express, and
it's worth more in Lojban to make it easy for them to express it,
than to make the language simpler.  Whereas for -gua!spi the
priorities are reversed although I claim to attempt to support as
many thought modes as possible by predicate semantics alone.

> > Finally, I have been rather ... um ... shocked to find predicates
> > with more than three arguments. Does this not impose an unnecessarily
> > large memory load in learning a verb - it's easier to learn two
> > argument places than six...

> Lojban does have the analogue of prepositions for adding extra places,
> but the underlying theory (not necessarily carried out perfectly for
> every predicate!) is that the numbered places represent those which
> are >necessary< to the claim.

I also have been won over by the "many arguments" model of Loglan/Lojban.
However, in some cases in Lojban I would disagree with including
particular extra arguments.  One driving force behind this disagreement
is a pragmatic connection to forming compound words, which is easier
when there are fewer arguments.

> ...There are many sets
> of words in the language which are contrasted precisely by the number of
> places metaphysically necessary for each:

It would be very nice if the gismu database had a cross reference
field.  I had been aware of these sets of related words, but I'm
glad John Cowan reminded me that Lojban had added a number of these
series.

                -- jimc