Lojban and case theory{ - response to Bruce and others

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!lojbab>]

>With regard to Bruce Gilson's proposal on conlang that a language with
explicit pre/postpositions for each place might be superior to
Loglan/Lojban's word-order dependent place structures:

We analyzed doing something like this, in search of a) an explicit case
system as an option for Lojban (JCB adopted such a system for his
version of the language in 1987 with 13 cases) and b) as an attempt to
satisfy ourselves as to the 'completeness' of the set of BAI cmavo.

Our best, but not only, reference, was a book entitled _The Case for
Lexicase_, which was at the time (and maybe still) the newest evolution
of Fillmore's case theory (discussed in JL3 or JL4 - I can't remember
which, but probably the latter).

Our conclusions:

- there was no consensus among linguists as to a necessary and
sufficient set of cases to cover all of language;

- the construction of Lojban tanru and lujvo allows for a hypothetical
lujvo to have an infinite number of rafsi components and hence places,
and hence no case system could exist in one-to-one correspondence to the
set of places of such an abstract predicate;

- that the imposition of any managable set of cases forced metaphysical
constraints (and bias) on the language, even if the case system was
optional, because it in effect says that two, say 'destination' places
are semantically related by virtue of being associated with the same BAI
preposition (for example, in English, we might see a relationship
between the final place of "he went to the store" and "I gave the book
to John", though most linguists would not consider these the same semantic
case "with" and "of" are even worse prepositions in this problem);

- that any such bias would undoubtedly reflect our English bias, and in
ways we could not easily identify because the case system of English is
so subliminal;

- that whatever small improvement in semantic clarity might be achieved
would be countered by the amount of memorization required:  you would
have to memorize all the cmavo (say the equivalent of the BAI list,
except that you couldn;t really get by until you knew most or all of
them, whereas it is possible to speak Lojban without knowing any members
of BAI), and you would have to memorize the semantic association of each
cmavo with each word, just as English speakers have to memorize what
"to", "with" and "of" mean for each English word/predicate.  Those
opposed to our place structures, as well as those who think that you
have to memorize every place structure of every gismu in order to speak
the language have very little idea just how much you had to 'memorize'
to reach your current mastery of English, and how much English you could
speak and understand without learning all these idiosyncrasies (indeed,
you probably learned them through inference based on how others used
them, and that is how we expect Lojbanists to learn Lojban place
structures as well - from usage by others backed up by reference
materials when necessary.)

> By the way - Lojban does have an effective equivalent to the Japanese
topic construct mentioned by Bruce, which although marked by a
postposition in Japanese is totally orthogonal to its case system and
has nothing to do with 'subject' (the object can be the topic equally
with the subject)
----
lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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