Re: lojban imperfections?

[Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@BANMATPC.MATH.ACAD.BG>]

My BGL10's worth regarding word order--

In natural languages it actually tends to be determined by the complex
interaction of several systems, to wit:

* semantic relations (agent, patient, goal, ...),
* syntactic functions (subject, object, adjunct, ...),
* discourse structure (topic, focus, comment, ...),

as well as anything else that may turn out to be relevant in some
particular language (animacy/activeness hierarchies come to mind).
In Turkish the subject comes first, whereas the object precedes the
verb, which comes last.  In Kabardian the more active argument comes
before the less active one.  (`Activeness' depends on such things as
animacy and specificity.)  Since subjects are usually more active
than objects, both languages are put down as SOV, which misses the
point that the motivation for that basic order is not the same.
That's why the classical classification of languages as VSO vs SVO
vs SOV etc. is potentially dangerous.

Now in Lojban discourse functions are marked by attitudinals and
prenexes, semantic ro^les are not consistently related to argument
structure, and concepts such as `subject' and `object' are only
useful with a huge lump of salt (which is how it should be, since
they are not universal in the first place).

Nevertheless, in so far as we accept the basic order counts (with
a due amount of scepticism), it has been established that the two
orders SVO and SOV are about equally frequent, each of them being
far more common than VSO, which in turn is much better attested
than all the OS orders put together.  All of which is reflected
admirably well in Lojban, where the closest counterparts of SVO
and SOV are both equally straightforward, VSO is available at the
cost of a fi and VOS, OVS and OSV at the cost of more than one fi.
As for why most of the Lojban utterances generated to date are
predicate-medial rather than predicate-final, well, that may have
something to do with the [native English speaker]hood of most of
the present population of Lojbanistan; but no one has to follow suit.

--
"mIw'e' lo'lu'ta'bogh batlh tlhIHvaD vIlIH [...]
 poH vIghajchugh neH jIH, yab boghajchugh neH tlhIH"
                                  (Lewis Carroll, "_Snark_ wamlu'")
Ivan A Derzhanski  <iad@banmatpc.math.acad.bg, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Dept for Math Lx,  Inst for Maths & CompSci,  Bulg Acad of Sciences
Home:  cplx Iztok  bl 91,  1113 Sofia,  Bulgaria