Re: The design of Lojban

[HACKER G N <c9709244@ALINGA.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU>]

On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Mark Vines wrote:
>
> These & similar questions & problems can be frustrating for
> some Lojban learners.  However, in calling attention to them,
> I don't want to adopt, or to inspire, an overly critical
> attitude.  Lojban is far from unique in being unpredictably
> different from English.  & I do feel that, on balance, Lojban
> lowers more barriers than it raises.

IMO, the attractive things that Lojban has done to lower barriers have
mainly been by removing forced choices: specifically, the choices about
number, gender and tense are good ones - as well as whether tense is more
important than aspect, as both are equally easy to express in Lojban, and
I find I use them both with comparable frequency.

No, there does not seem to be any logic to guide you in telling which
sumti places take objects and which take abstractions. In my experience,
it is the objects which are more important than the abstractions, and that
any sumti place that takes an object could be supplemented by another
sumti place somewhere else in the predicate meaning "due to property" or
some other such thing. Having to use "tu'a"s all the time is clumsy. I
find Lojban has often already done similar things with agents and forces.

Geoff