No Subject

[Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

>   1.  In Lojban, why is the first argument of a predicate put before that
>   predicate?  ... Shouldn't the predicate be first, and then its
>   arguments?

The reason is historical. The default is SVO in lojban, because James Cooke
Brown decided it ought be that way in Loglan (see the 1960 Scientific
American article by Brown). Loglan was an early version of lojban. He did
this for reasons that have never been particularly clear to me, but he
might have had a good reason, and the language is flexible enough so it
really doesn't matter very much. Maybe because SVO is the most common
pattern in human languages. I would have preferred that lojban follow the
predicate logic form where the predicate is initial (or equivalently,
terminal). If you want, you can put the predicate at the beginning, at the
cost of a fi. (Sorry, thats the best pun I can manage with my limited
lojban)

I was under the impression that SVO *was* important in the Sapir-Whorf
sense. One of my linguistics professors in college gave the example of
German, where the listener sits around until the end of the sentence
waiting for the meaning to become clear. I don't know German, and don't
remember the example she gave, but I thought it had to do with SVO in
English vs. other arrangements in spoken German.

-Steven

Steven Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria