Lojban In General

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:30 PM, tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:

> Gizon-a | etorri da.
> Vir-o | ekalvenis.
> lo nanmu | co'i/ba'o klama
>
> Gizon-ak | mutil-a | ikusi du.
> Vir-o | knab-on | vidis.
> lo nanmu | lo nanla | pu viska
> In Lojban, on the other hand, cases are

...

> It therefore buffers the
> difference between the nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive
> languages. It allows a Basque/Tibetan/Mayan etc. speaker to
> communicate with an English/Japanese/Esperanto etc. speaker without
> being distracted at the aforementioned dissimilarity.
>

So then does English also buffer the difference between the two, since it
also does not morphologically specify case? I think Lojban is as
nominative-accusative as it gets. (Predicate logic was invented by people
who spoke and were familiar with nominative-accusative languages.) If the
correct Lojban for the first sentence were "klama lo nanmu" (not "klama *fa*
lo nanmu), then we could probably say that Lojban is ergative-absolutive.

--
Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>
Got sente?

2009/2/16 Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>:
> So then does English also buffer the difference between the two, since it
> also does not morphologically specify case?

Though irregularly, it does specify for at least some of the pronouns.
In "I saw him", the accusative case of "him" is morphologically
specified (in contrast to "he"). So is "I".

> I think Lojban is as
> nominative-accusative as it gets. (Predicate logic was invented by people
> who spoke and were familiar with nominative-accusative languages.) If the
> correct Lojban for the first sentence were "klama lo nanmu" (not "klama *fa*
> lo nanmu), then we could probably say that Lojban is ergative-absolutive.

Syntactic ergativity is quite rare
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative-absolutive_language). And I
don't see why the x2 of "klama" being the agent/subject would be so
indicative of an ergative-absolutive syntax. The Basque example
already shows that the subject doesn't necessarily follows the verb in
an ergative-absolutive language. I've learned that there are also
nominative-accusative languages where the verb preceds the subject,
such as formal Arabic, Gaelic, Hawaiian, and, to a lesser extent,
Romanian, Hungarian and Finnish.

mu'o mi'e tijlan

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:32 PM, tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:

> > I think Lojban is as
> > nominative-accusative as it gets. (Predicate logic was invented by people
> > who spoke and were familiar with nominative-accusative languages.) If the
> > correct Lojban for the first sentence were "klama lo nanmu" (not "klama
> *fa*
> > lo nanmu), then we could probably say that Lojban is ergative-absolutive.
>
> Syntactic ergativity is quite rare
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative-absolutive_language).

There's no morphological inflection in Lojban, so whatever morphosyntactic
alignment it has has to be syntactic and not morpho-.

> And I
> don't see why the x2 of "klama" being the agent/subject would be so
> indicative of an ergative-absolutive syntax.

Because then the argument of an intransitive verb is treated the same as the
object of a transitive verb (treating 'klama' as intransitive, which may be
arguable).

> The Basque example
> already shows that the subject doesn't necessarily follows the verb in
> an ergative-absolutive language. I've learned that there are also
> nominative-accusative languages where the verb preceds the subject,
> such as formal Arabic, Gaelic, Hawaiian, and, to a lesser extent,
> Romanian, Hungarian and Finnish.

Of course. VSO languages are not rare, and most of them are accusative, not
ergative. (You can add Biblical Hebrew to the list.) The question isn't the
order of the sentence constituents, but how the argument of an intransitive
verb is treated compared to the subject and object of a transitive verb.

--
Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>
Got sente?

2009/2/16 Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>:
> There's no morphological inflection in Lojban, so whatever morphosyntactic
> alignment it has has to be syntactic and not morpho-.

Right, I'm not saying that Lojban is morphologically
ergative-absolutive, but that it conveniently neutralizes the
differing nominative and ergative perspectives.

>> And I
>> don't see why the x2 of "klama" being the agent/subject would be so
>> indicative of an ergative-absolutive syntax.
>
> Because then the argument of an intransitive verb is treated the same as the
> object of a transitive verb (treating 'klama' as intransitive, which may be
> arguable).

However, the object of a transitive verb in an ergative-absolutive
language is not agentive, is it? In "Gizonak mutila ikusi du",
"mutila" is the object and has the same absolutive suffix as what
"gizon-" as the argument/subject of an intransitive verb would take,
but it is not agentive; it's not the boy who is seeing himself. Now if
a hypothetical place structure of "viska" is such that the x2 is the
agent of "seeing", it remains as the subject, not the object, despite
the conversion. Likewise, the hypothetical word order in "klama lo
nanmu" simply means that "lo nanmu" is the agentive subject of
"klama", which could still be used to correspondently translate
sentences of either ergative-absolutive ("Etorri da | gizonak.") or
nominative-accusative ("Ekalvenis | viro."). The point is that, in
Lojban, speakers of either type can talk without unlearning their
native perspective of the linguistic alignment, apart from the word
order.

mu'o mi'e tijlan

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:52 PM, tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:

> Now if
> a hypothetical place structure of "viska" is such that the x2 is the
> agent of "seeing", it remains as the subject, not the object, despite
> the conversion.

You mean a selbri with the place structure of 'selviska', but atomic, not
derived by conversion? I don't think so. Even though you changed the order
of the arguments to something very unconventional, my guess is that the
syntactic structure in the heads of people who actually used that word in
that language would put the agent as the object. One would have to do
linguistic experiments with a native speaker to tell for sure.

> Likewise, the hypothetical word order in "klama lo
> nanmu" simply means that "lo nanmu" is the agentive subject of
> "klama", which could still be used to correspondently translate
> sentences of either ergative-absolutive ("Etorri da | gizonak.") or
> nominative-accusative ("Ekalvenis | viro.").

I don't quite follow you. Is "Etorri da gizonak" good Basque? It looks like
it contradicts your above sentence.

> The point is that, in
> Lojban, speakers of either type can talk without unlearning their
> native perspective of the linguistic alignment, apart from the word
> order.

A Basque speaker sees the argument of an intransitive verb (which is always
x1 in Lojban) as occupying the same syntactic role as the object of a
transitive verb (which for our purposes we'll say is x2 in Lojban. It
certainly isn't x1.) A Lojban speaker, who knows the languages, sees x1 and
x2 as syntactically distinct, which is why Lojban's morphosyntactic
alignment is different from Basque's.

--
Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>
Got sente?

On Monday 16 February 2009 08:52:23 tijlan wrote:
> 2009/2/16 Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>:
> > There's no morphological inflection in Lojban, so whatever
> > morphosyntactic alignment it has has to be syntactic and not morpho-.
>
> Right, I'm not saying that Lojban is morphologically
> ergative-absolutive, but that it conveniently neutralizes the
> differing nominative and ergative perspectives.

I say either Lojban doesn't have a morphosyntactic alignment, or it has one
that no natlang has.

If I were explaining morphosyntactic alignment in Lojban terms, I'd say that
the subject of a transitive verb in an accusative language is x1, whereas in
an ergative language it's x2. I'm not sure how I'd explain split ergativity.
The one instance in which I know how it arose, which is modern Indic, the
past tense was originally a participle, used as a passive with the
instrumental.

Pierre

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:

> I say either Lojban doesn't have a morphosyntactic alignment, or it has one
> that no natlang has.
>

Formally, it is a bit weird, but I think that the actual cognitive
structures that speakers of Lojban use are the same as those used by
speakers of accusative languages (and that would be the case even if a
monolingual native speaker of an ergative language learned Lojban fluently.)

--
Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>
Got sente?

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Formally, it is a bit weird, but I think that the actual cognitive
> structures that speakers of Lojban use are the same as those used by
> speakers of accusative languages (and that would be the case even if a
> monolingual native speaker of an ergative language learned Lojban fluently.)

I tend to agree.

If Lojban had lots more gismu pairs like citka/cidja, tirna/savru,
bacru/voksa, and assuming those pairs were more or less identical in
meaning except for the argument order (which is probably not really
the case now), then it could be argued that it was neutral with
respect to the accusative/ergative divide.

A speaker with accusative tendencies would go with "lo smacu cu ca'o
citka lo cirla", and a speaker with ergative tendencies would say "lo
cirla cu ca'o cidja lo mlatu", and they would both mean exactly the
same thing.

We do have such pairs for all predicates if we count viska/selviska,
catra/selcatra, and so on, but the ergative-like one is marked, so
there is a bias towards the accusative alignment.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com> wrote:

> A Basque speaker sees the argument of an intransitive verb (which is always
> x1 in Lojban) as occupying the same syntactic role as the object of a
> transitive verb (which for our purposes we'll say is x2 in Lojban. It
> certainly isn't x1.) A Lojban speaker, who knows the languages, sees x1 and
> x2 as syntactically distinct, which is why Lojban's morphosyntactic
> alignment is different from Basque's.

This has remembered me a motto from CONLANG list maybe ten or so years
ago, during du'emoi discussion on accusative/ergative topic:

"Murder is just transitive death".

--
http://slobin.pp.ru/ `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said,
<cyril@slobin.pp.ru> `it means just what I choose it to mean'

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