James Cooke Brown on SVO order

[John Cowan <cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan@UUNET.UU.NET>]

The following text was originally written by JCB in 1967-68, published as
part of Chapter 6 of his book >Loglan 2: Methods of Construction<, and reprinted
in >The Loglanist< 1:2, p. 54ff.  Since none of these sources is readily
available, I am sending it to both Lojban and conlang lists.  It provides
an interesting insight into the mind of a language designer at work.

[JCB begins by defending SVO as the order of choice because of its prevalence
in Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish, French, and German, 6 of his 8
source languages.]

There was a time, however, when [VSO] order was seriously, if briefly,
considered for Loglan.  This order has a certain traditional charm for
logicians -- witness the standard schematic notation 'Fxy' for a two-place
predicate, for example -- and for certain purposes of manipulation it has
undeniable advantages.  But for a spoken and, at the same time, uninflected
language the VSO order turns out to be quite unsuitable.  The argument
which discloses that result may bear repeating here.

We note first that, on the most fundamental grounds, arguments are not to be
distinguished \it{except} by word order in Loglan.  Thus we entertain no "case
endings", or other marking devices, by which "Subjects" can be intrinsically
distinguished from "Objects".  \footnote{I leave the argument behind \it{this}
remark, however, to the reader.}  One form of the argument then hinges on the
management of imperatives.  \footnote{It could as well be based on specified
descriptions; see below.}

[Editorial interjection: Both Loglan and Lojban have to some extent withdrawn
from the original rejection of case marking, and have created a set of
optional case tags.  However, neither form of the language uses them much.
In Lojban, the argument about "imperatives" which follows must be replaced
by an exactly parallel argument about "observatives", since Lojban interprets
a V-first sentence as an elliptical subject without imperative coloring.
I have added bracketed comments to the next paragraph giving the Lojban,
as distinct from the Loglan, viewpoint.]

Now imperatives [resp. observatives] are almost invariably short forms; there
is apparently little scope for long-windedness in giving warnings or
commands [resp. drawing the hearer's attention to things in the environment].
Moreover, the first argument of an imperatively [resp. observatively] used
predicate is almost always the hearer [resp. understood from context], and
as the omission of any constant feature of a message cannot reduce its
information content, first arguments are nearly always [resp. always]
omitted in the imperative [resp. observative] mode (e.g. as in English
'Go!' [resp. 'Delicious!']).  But if we omit the first argument from the
form PAA (Predicate-Argument-Argument) -- for arguments, note, are to be
taken as indistinguishable -- we obtain a result that does not differ
from the result of omitting a second argument, or a third.  Therefore
the adoption of the PAA schema as the standard order for the Loglan
sentence deprives us of a good way of defining imperatives [resp. observatives].
In fact, it deprives us of the only way of defining imperatives that is
consistent with the other patterns of an uninflected language.  [Lojban
makes use of a special "imperative 2nd person pronoun" which may appear
as any argument, thus permitting more complex imperative forms while
remaining "uninflected".]

Similar difficulties arise with specified descriptions.  Thus if 'He gave
the horse to John' is to become something like 'Gave he the horse John',
how \it{do} you say 'the giver of the horse to John'?  A form like 'the
give the horse John' will not do, since it is the designation of the giver,
not the gift, which normally follows the predicate.  Only by introducing
some sort of dummy argument into the 'Fxyz' form, e.g. 'F-yz', can we
keep the meaning clear.  But this is awkward.  These seemed good reasons not
to use the VSO form, especially as the SVO form does not suffer this disaster.
Thus, the schema APA yields an unmistakable PA in the imperative [resp.
observative] mood.

Incidentally, the SOV order ('He the horse John gave') collapses into the same
kind of ambiguity under the pressure of abbreviation.  (Is 'The horse John
give' an imperative, or an incomplete declaration?) Thus, curiously enough,
and independent of any facts about the distribution of these arrangements
among languages, we would have been forced to abandon the logicians' notational
convention anyway.  For once incomplete or abbreviated forms are considered --
and in a spoken language they are far more frequent than unabbreviated forms --
the predicate can no longer be treated as a prefix or a suffix of its
uninflected arguments ('Fxy' or 'xyF') but must be treated as an infix
('xFy').  It is only of suche initially infixed arrangements that the
fragments left by the removal of uninflected arguments (e.g. 'xF' and 'Fy')
remain reconstructable and, hence, grammatically clear.

\footnote{In these analyses, by the way, we may have isolated the ambiguity-
avoidance mechanism behind one of Greenberg's most interesting universals,
namely that all SOV languages have case systems (his Universal 41).
I am surprised that the principle does not hold for VSO languages as well.
If it did, we should then have strong evidence for the even more
interesting converse principle that only SVO languages can be analytic:
a fact we suspect anyway, but we would then know why.}

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.