Re: auto-insertion or VSO

[cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!jimc]

Steven Mesnick <pro-angmar!steffan@ALFALFA.COM> writes:
> It may be useful to know how a *very* new Lojban-learner deals with this
> matter when reading Lojban sentences...  I naturally (Intuitively?)
> translated them in ways consistent with his arguments...  I read that
> sentence as meaning what Robert argues that it *should* mean.

This is a significant point, that lots of people, myself included,
would "intuitively" translate a sentence containing an abstract bridi
as it "should" be, i.e. with the internal sumti starting in the
abstraction's second place.  But:

        Is this malglico?  Nearly all Lojban people are native English
        speakers and that very likely does affect how they "intuitively"
        interpret a new language.  We don't want to make Lojban into a
        mere farrago of our language biases derived from various native
        languages like English.

But I think it's sufficient to choose that the "start in x2" rule is
pragmatically useful, whether or not similar to English.  Then we
develop (or have already developed) syntax - transformation - semantic
rules which cause the parser to obey it, and which then ease the user's
burden to speak in Lojban.

                -- jimc