Glossing

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Pierre Abbat

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Apr 25, 2019, 12:02:06 AM4/25/19
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Morphematim (morphematatim?) glossing is used in linguistics to show the
grammatical structure of text in a language. Content morphemes are glossed in
lowercase (capitalized if they are proper nouns, or any nouns if the glosses
are in German); function morphemes are glossed in small caps (or all caps if
you don't have small caps). Here's a simple sentence in Lojban with an
attitudinal phrase. How would you gloss it?

i lo bicrbombu cu se bevri mi o'adai lo mamta be mi vau

Can you come up with other examples of Lojban sentences and how to gloss them?

Pierre
--
Lanthanidia deliciosa: What the kiwifruit would be
if it weren't so radioactive.



Mike S.

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Apr 25, 2019, 2:57:04 PM4/25/19
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On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 12:02 AM Pierre Abbat <ph...@bezitopo.org> wrote:
Morphematim (morphematatim?) glossing is used in linguistics to show the
grammatical structure of text in a language.

Perhaps it could just as well be shortened to "morphatim", assuming "interlinear" is not clear enough.  (For those on the list who were confused like me:  I think it's modeled on the adverb "verbatim" and means "morpheme-by-morpheme").
 
Content morphemes are glossed in
lowercase (capitalized if they are proper nouns, or any nouns if the glosses
are in German); function morphemes are glossed in small caps (or all caps if
you don't have small caps). Here's a simple sentence in Lojban with an
attitudinal phrase. How would you gloss it?

i lo bicrbombu cu se bevri mi o'adai lo mamta be mi vau

What this little example shows is how much of Lojban defies conventional description.  Someone would have come up with special glosses, as the usual list is of little avail.  Here, I try to make new glosses by adding -Z (starter/izer) and -T (terminator) to known abbreviations.  -Z is standard but -T is my own invention.

Usual list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations


i lo bicrbombu cu se bevri mi o'adai lo mamta be mi vau
SENTT DET bee-CLZ-Bombus VPZ INV carry 1 proudly-OBV DET mother INAL 1 VPT

Breakdown:

morph / gloss (/ gloss translation)
* = Not standard, or not common

i / *SENT or *SENTT / sentence or sentence-terminator (actually a separator, but "terminator" is close enough)
lo / DET or *NPZ / determiner or noun-phrase-izer
bic- / bee
-r- / *CLZ / classifier-izer (turns previous morpheme into a classifier prefix)
-bombu / "Bombus" or bumblebee
cu / *VPZ / verb-phrase-izer
se / INV / inverse voice
bevri / carry
mi / 1 or 1SG / 1st person or 1st person singular (pragmatically, probably sg right?)
o'a- / proudly
-dai / OBV / obviate (don't know what else to call this)
lo / DET or *NPZ
mamta / mother
be / INAL / inalienable possession
mi / 1
vau / *VPT / verb-phrase-terminator

 
mi'e .maik.
mu'o.
 

Bob LeChevalier

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Apr 25, 2019, 5:20:59 PM4/25/19
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On 4/25/2019 2:56 PM, Mike S. wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 12:02 AM Pierre Abbat <ph...@bezitopo.org
> <mailto:ph...@bezitopo.org>> wrote:
>
> Morphematim (morphematatim?) glossing is used in linguistics to show
> the
> grammatical structure of text in a language.
>
>
> Perhaps it could just as well be shortened to "morphatim", assuming
> "interlinear" is not clear enough.  (For those on the list who were
> confused like me:  I think it's modeled on the adverb "verbatim" and
> means "morpheme-by-morpheme").

The term used in linguistics is apparently "Interlinear morphemic
glossing" Google on that and on the first page of hits, you will see
the "Leipzig rules" and a Wikipedia list of standard abbreviations (with
links to explanations of the abbreviations, most of which I never heard of)

A lot of the abbreviations listed could be applied to various Lojban
cmavo, or rather the cmavo could be glossed using those abbreviations.
But the terminology would need to be correlated, with many of the
abbreviations applying to individual cmavo, especially words in selma'o
UI (other than attitudinals, such as evidentials which account for
several of the abbreviations).

Most Lojban attitudinals are probably best considered content words
expressed at a metalinguistic level, and hence would not use capitalized
abbreviations. I have usually glossed attitudinals parenthetically,
with parentheses in this case indicating a separate metalinguistic level
from the main text

I'm not particular sure what Pierre intends by o'adai in that sentence;
not sure who is supposedly feeling pride. The mother or the listener?
So I'm just marking the dai as "EMPATH"

> i lo bicrbombu cu se bevri mi o'adai lo mamta be mi vau
> SEP ART bumblebee? SEP PASS.INV-carried-by-me (pride-EMPATH) [-to] ART mother-OBJ-me TERMIN

I think only SEP (separator), TERMIN (terminator) and EMPATH (empathic
attitudinal) are not in the standard abbreviations list, and the rest
should be pretty obvious. I also used the bracketed [-to] which is
actually part of the gloss of bevri, as symbolized by the hyphen, put in
a more readable position (5+ place brivla would be even harder to
express without such readability aids).

I don't sense that morphemic glossing necessarily is as comprehensive in
the structure words as Mike S's attempt provides. After all, English
has several kinds of articles and they all probably gloss as ART. There
is an abbreviation for "definite" (DEF), but none for "indefinite", two
of the kinds of articles in English. But probably if we wanted to
systematize glossing in Lojban we might invent abbreviations to
distinguish lo, la, lei, and loi (there is no abbreviation for
mass-nouns either in the standard list)

lojbab



Pierre Abbat

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Apr 25, 2019, 8:02:58 PM4/25/19
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On Thursday, 25 April 2019 14.56.44 EDT Mike S. wrote:
> i lo bicrbombu cu se bevri mi o'adai lo mamta be mi vau
> SENTT DET bee-CLZ-Bombus VPZ INV carry 1 proudly-OBV DET mother INAL 1 VPT
>
> Breakdown:
>
> morph / gloss (/ gloss translation)
> * = Not standard, or not common
>
> i / *SENT or *SENTT / sentence or sentence-terminator (actually a
> separator, but "terminator" is close enough)
> lo / DET or *NPZ / determiner or noun-phrase-izer
> bic- / bee
> -r- / *CLZ / classifier-izer (turns previous morpheme into a classifier
> prefix)

"-r-", which has allomorphs "-n-" and, only in type-3 fu'ivla, "-l-", is an
interfix. It doesn't mean anything; it's required by morphology rules.

Classifiers, in linguistics, are words used with numbers (or, in Apachean
languages, denoting grouping) to indicate the type of thing counted. "bic-" is
something else.

> -bombu / "Bombus" or bumblebee
> cu / *VPZ / verb-phrase-izer

It's the same thing as "i" in Tok Pisin, which is called the predicate marker.

> se / INV / inverse voice

INV2, as there are also te, ve, and xe.

> bevri / carry
> mi / 1 or 1SG / 1st person or 1st person singular (pragmatically, probably
> sg right?)

I'd say 1SG, as Lojban has 1PL pronouns with clusivity. "mi" can be used with
a plural referent, which means that we all speak as one, or something like
that.

> o'a- / proudly

It's not an adverb ("proudly" would modify "carry"). It's an attitudinal, and
should get an abbreviation in caps.

> -dai / OBV / obviate (don't know what else to call this)

I don't either. The obviative marks a third person as being less salient than
another third person. One of "ko'a" and "fo'a" could be considered proximate
and the other obviative.

> lo / DET or *NPZ
> mamta / mother
> be / INAL / inalienable possession

Inalienable possession is "po'e". "lo citka be lo funduki" does not mean "the
eater inalienably possessed by a hazelnut"; it means "someone who eats a
hazelnut".

> mi / 1
> vau / *VPT / verb-phrase-terminator

On Thursday, 25 April 2019 17.20.55 EDT Bob LeChevalier wrote:

> I'm not particular sure what Pierre intends by o'adai in that sentence;
> not sure who is supposedly feeling pride. The mother or the listener?
> So I'm just marking the dai as "EMPATH"

The Lojban doesn't say who's feeling pride, so it should not be specified in
the gloss, but it's the mother. "Won't my mommy be so proud of me?"

Pierre
--
La sal en el mar es más que en la sangre.
Le sel dans la mer est plus que dans le sang.



Mike S.

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Apr 25, 2019, 9:56:14 PM4/25/19
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On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 5:20 PM Bob LeChevalier <loj...@lojban.org> wrote:

> i   lo  bicrbombu  cu  se       bevri      mi o'adai               lo  mamta  be  mi vau
> SEP ART bumblebee? SEP PASS.INV-carried-by-me (pride-EMPATH) [-to] ART mother-OBJ-me TERMIN


I am no expert at glossing (far from it), but I think there are some possible points of confusion here where things are supposed to line up.  I think hyphens should generally indicate morpheme breaks within words.  Dots seem to be used when several gloss-components hold together in one object-language morpheme.  So your gloss ought to be something like:

SEP ART bumblebee SEP PASS.INV carried.by me (pride-EMPATH) [to] ART mother OBJ me TERMIN

 
I think only SEP (separator), TERMIN (terminator) and EMPATH (empathic
attitudinal) are not in the standard abbreviations list, and the rest
should be pretty obvious.  I also used the bracketed [-to] which is
actually part of the gloss of bevri, as symbolized by the hyphen, put in
a more readable position (5+ place brivla would be even harder to
express without such readability aids).

I like my idea of e.g. VPZ .... VPT because abbreviations like VP are already widely understood among English-speaking linguists and the -Z...-T convention (or something like it) can be used to convey the not-widely-understood functions of these Lojban particles, which IMHO ought to be one of the points of writing the gloss in the first place.
 

I don't sense that morphemic glossing necessarily is as comprehensive in
the structure words as Mike S's attempt provides.  After all, English
has several kinds of articles and they all probably gloss as ART.  There
is an abbreviation for "definite" (DEF), but none for "indefinite", two
of the kinds of articles in English.  But probably if we wanted to
systematize glossing in Lojban we might invent abbreviations to
distinguish lo, la, lei, and loi (there is no abbreviation for
mass-nouns either in the standard list)

You can use dots to add features to a gloss.  French "la" might be glossed as ART.DEF.FEM and Lojban "loi" might be ART.MASS.

Bob LeChevalier

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Apr 26, 2019, 8:45:57 AM4/26/19
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I hope my URLS appear correctly here.

On 4/25/2019 9:55 PM, Mike S. wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 5:20 PM Bob LeChevalier <loj...@lojban.org
> <mailto:loj...@lojban.org>> wrote:
> > i   lo  bicrbombu  cu  se       bevri      mi o'adai
>  lo  mamta  be  mi vau
> > SEP ART bumblebee? SEP PASS.INV-carried-by-me (pride-EMPATH)
> [-to] ART mother-OBJ-me TERMIN
>
>
> I am no expert at glossing (far from it), but I think there are some
> possible points of confusion here where things are supposed to line up.
> I think hyphens should generally indicate morpheme breaks within words.
> Dots seem to be used when several gloss-components hold together in one
> object-language morpheme.  So your gloss ought to be something like:
>
> SEP ART bumblebee SEP PASS.INV carried.by <http://carried.by> me
> (pride-EMPATH) [to] ART mother OBJ me TERMIN

I agree with the dot instead of the hyphen after "carried" (but not the
URL insert, which I am pretty sure you did not intend). And I should
have used a dot instead of a hyphen before the "to" for the same reason
(or maybe a triple dot omitted.ellipsis since this is continuing a
previous paradigm).

> I think only SEP (separator), TERMIN (terminator) and EMPATH (empathic
> attitudinal) are not in the standard abbreviations list, and the rest
> should be pretty obvious.  I also used the bracketed [-to] which is
> actually part of the gloss of bevri, as symbolized by the hyphen,
> put in
> a more readable position (5+ place brivla would be even harder to
> express without such readability aids).
>
>
> I like my idea of e.g. VPZ .... VPT because abbreviations like VP are
> already widely understood among English-speaking linguists and the
> -Z...-T convention (or something like it) can be used to convey the
> not-widely-understood functions of these Lojban particles, which IMHO
> ought to be one of the points of writing the gloss in the first place.

The latter would seem to be the key issue. Why are we writing the
gloss? The most usual reason for writing a gloss is to clarify what is
going on for the reader. The reader in this case is almost always a
Lojban learner and not an "English-speaking linguist" where the latter
word refers to the academic professional field rather than the
learner-of-languages. Most learners don't know the "widely-understood"
abbreviations, nor the technical terms they represent. Looking at the
wikipedia list of abbreviations (
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations> ), I
didn't recognize most of the terms they represent, and I did a
personal-if-amateur study of Comrie's linguistic universals work early
in my Lojban designing effort. I see no particular advantage in using
words that most people don't know, and especially if we are using them
in ways that only approximate the technical meaning.

I thus favor for teaching the language, the introduction of standard
terminology that is specific to the Lojban design, and is not beholden
to academic linguistic norms that learners likely won't know, and
academics would be prone to quibble with (and indeed academics DID
quibble with a lot of the usages that I made, and even more that JCB
made in the original Loglan design).

That is why brivla, bridi, selma'o (and their various capitalized names)
are used in Lojban documentation. We don't need to argue whether a BAI
is a modal, or an adverb, or a preposition. It is serving the Lojban
grammatical function of a BAI, which possibly might be any of those
terms in some context that an academic linguist might quibble with. (I
am reminded of JCB's example which in Lojban is raumoi "enough.th" as an
ordinal number). Similarly many of the members of UI could be assigned
to specific abbreviations on the list of the "-ive" variety, but in
studying Lojban probably one should simply view them as UI for
grammatical explanation, or possibly one of several categories of UI
(which in my baseline cmavo lists are shown as UI1 (attitudinals), UI2
(evidentials), UI4 (emotion aspects). UI7 (emotion contours), etc.

Of course when writing for the academic linguistic world, the gloss
needs to conform to academic norms such as the "Leipzig rules" for
morphemic glossing (see the google search I referenced to find these).
But in such cases, I think the person writing the paper should be
clarifying the abbreviations being used and what they are actually
representing in Lojban that might not apply to other languages. Makes a
lot more sense than a huge chunk of the abbreviations in the standard
list that are defined solely by how they are used in a couple of
specific languages e,g, "adessive", "antessive". And then there are
terms like "classifier" which Pierre just quibbled on as applying only
to how things are counted. The wikipedia definition is more generic and
it would definite include bic- as a classifier morpheme, which is in
fact what it was designed to be, after the fashion of the Dyirbal
classes described in
<https://en.wikipedia.org>/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things,
except that Lojban doesn't have "noun classes" (
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class> ) since it doesn't have nouns
- just brivla which might serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and in some
forms adverbs, and a bunch of other things. I would argue that
"classifier" is the right linguistics term, based on
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)> which states

"Languages with classifiers may have up to several hundred different
classifiers, whereas those with noun classes (or in particular, genders)
tend to have a smaller number of classes, not always much dependent on
the nouns' meaning, and with a variety of grammatical consequences."

Lojban Type.III.fu'ivla prefixes can be any of the rafsi (affixes) and
are highly dependent on the brivla's "meaning" and with no grammatical
consequences, and thus "noun class" would be the wrong term even if that
was what actually inspired the design element (there were other
considerations besides that book that led to this sort of classifier in
Type.III.fu'ivla, most especially the efforts in creating words for
Linnean terms and chemical element names, both of which JCB had tackled
in Loglan with poor solutions, but Lakoff's book was much talked about
at the time).

> I don't sense that morphemic glossing necessarily is as
> comprehensive in
> the structure words as Mike S's attempt provides.  After all, English
> has several kinds of articles and they all probably gloss as ART.
> There
> is an abbreviation for "definite" (DEF), but none for "indefinite", two
> of the kinds of articles in English.  But probably if we wanted to
> systematize glossing in Lojban we might invent abbreviations to
> distinguish lo, la, lei, and loi (there is no abbreviation for
> mass-nouns either in the standard list)
>
> You can use dots to add features to a gloss.  French "la" might be
> glossed as ART.DEF.FEM and Lojban "loi" might be ART.MASS.

It might, *but* I think that would be an incorrect choice. The use of
capitalized terms are supposed to be about referencing grammatical
concepts and effects, and not content concepts. Arguably, all of the
members of selma'o LE are simply articles, and which flavor of article
has utterly no grammatical effect, UI and BAI and PA would also be
grammatical categories that in theory have no grammatical effect, and I
only favor sub-categorizing them (with numbers after the selma'o)
because in actual usage, attitudinals, evidentials, contours, etc have
distinctly different effects on meaning even while having the same
nominal grammar, and those sub-categories are useful in explaining
actual usage in Lojban to a learner (or perhaps a linguist), whereas the
various "-ive" linguistic terms in the standard list that might be
applied only to individual cmavo would imply grammatical functionality
that isn't part of the language (e.g. "fa'a" which I think corresponds
to "adessive or venitive case" but in fact has nothing to do with
linguistic "case", and is two linguistic terms covering something that
is only one cmavo in a set having real grammatical value (selma'o FAhA),
because they combine in a grammatically predictable way with MOhI, where
I suspect there are no standard terms for most of the other members of
FAhA that have identical grammar but are not adessive, and nothing so
far as I know that can describe MOhI).

Loglan/Lojban was designed by intent to be extreme linguistically with
respect to many language norms that are mandatory in some languages
while being ignored in other languages. People know about number and
tense as being important parts of Lojban's elimination of mandatory
features, but equally important are these other lesser known features
that are also non-mandatory, but are permitted (even though they may
have no clear correspondence in the speakers native language, hence
things like our aorist-like tenses (ZAhO), evidentials, etc.)

How much a language speaker comes to use these categories in Lojban that
are not used in their native languages, and to what effect, is clearly
part of the realm implied by the Sapir-Whorf testing aspect of
Loglan/Lojban. I have frequently said that Lojban's enormous and highly
flexible attitudinal system might show more in the way of Sapir-Whorf
effects than the features of the original Loglan design (formal logical
connectives, logical predicate brivla, uniquely parsible "metaphoric"
modification). TLI Loglan lacks that enormity and flexibility in its
corresponding set.

And the features that might make a difference in forms of usage are the
ones linguists SHOULD be interested in when trying to understand how
Lojban grammar works. For that reason, the use of selma'o names with
subcategory numbers where applicable is far better than the use of
standard terminology, and also has the benefit of being more
understandable to the layperson who doesn't know the linguistic jargon.

On the other hand, I once proposed to some academic linguists the use of
Lojban as itself a form of linguistic jargon interlanguage for conveying
glosses of other languages and respecting their features. Lojban in
effect has a superset of most of the features of pretty much all other
languages, even if they aren't conveyed via mandatory grammatical
features in Lojban. Thus Lojban can convey the complexity of a Nootka
sentence/word as a Lojban tanru or even a many-part lujvo, as well as
the variety of cases in the Finno-Ugric languages. Using the terms
invented to describe these features in academic descriptions of those
languages limits one to an audience of those who know the language
enough to understand the terms. Lojban as an interlanguage loses
information about what is conveyed via grammar words vs via content
words in the source language, but might be more effective in conveying
the semantics that result.

Enough for now. I've essentially denigrated the purpose of Pierre's
original question, which was not what I started trying to do in
answering him. But it has been a long while since a question came up
here that strongly ties back to the original design concepts of the
language, as well as Loglan/Lojban's ties, both positive and negative,
to the academic linguistic community (which for the most part haven't
had much respect for artificial languages, though I'm not in tune enough
to know whether the attitudes of academic linguistics might have changed
since the 80s when Lojban was designed).

lojbab

Mike S.

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Apr 26, 2019, 10:18:25 AM4/26/19
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On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 8:02 PM Pierre Abbat <ph...@bezitopo.org> wrote:
"-r-", which has allomorphs "-n-" and, only in type-3 fu'ivla, "-l-", is an
interfix. It doesn't mean anything; it's required by morphology rules.

Are you suggesting that -r/n- can be used as an interfix outside of type-3 fu'ivla?  Outside of the type-3 use, I have seen syllabic consonants only *inside* certain marginal fu'ivla shapes.  At any rate, I am not sure that it is correct to say that these interfixes have no meaning, since there are two contrastive types (in some positions at least) with obvious differences in meaning.  A -y- signals that the left-side part is a dependent stem in a conventional compound, while an -n/r- in type-3 signals an "intra-stem" relationship in which the left-side is a semantic hint and the right-side is content.

 
Classifiers, in linguistics, are words used with numbers (or, in Apachean
languages, denoting grouping) to indicate the type of thing counted. "bic-" is
something else.

True.  What I was driving at is noun class, but there is no symbol for that.  I interpret bicr- as something like a noun-class marker.  Not exactly, of course, since Lojban type-3 prefixes are much more open-class than attested noun class systems e.g. in Bantu languages and some Polynesian languages.
 

> -bombu / "Bombus" or bumblebee
> cu / *VPZ / verb-phrase-izer

It's the same thing as "i" in Tok Pisin, which is called the predicate marker.

Looks like PM is the abbreviation for that. 
 

> se / INV / inverse voice

INV2, as there are also te, ve, and xe.

> bevri / carry
> mi / 1 or 1SG / 1st person or 1st person singular (pragmatically, probably
> sg right?)

I'd say 1SG, as Lojban has 1PL pronouns with clusivity. "mi" can be used with
a plural referent, which means that we all speak as one, or something like
that.

Those are my thoughts too.  It might make sense in corporate prayer, legal contracts, signed petitions, and the like.  I still tend to think that pragmatically any plural use of "mi" should be marked as "ro mi" or something.  The plural meaning is hardly ever needed, and IMHO it's more confusing (as in these glosses) than helpful to have it hanging around.

 

> o'a- / proudly

It's not an adverb ("proudly" would modify "carry"). It's an attitudinal, and
should get an abbreviation in caps.

Something like proud.ATNL perhaps?

 

> -dai / OBV / obviate (don't know what else to call this)

I don't either. The obviative marks a third person as being less salient than
another third person. One of "ko'a" and "fo'a" could be considered proximate
and the other obviative.

Right, and similarly, -dai marks something that is less salient than the first person.  Another case where I tried to recycle something out there in use.

 

> lo / DET or *NPZ
> mamta / mother
> be / INAL / inalienable possession

Inalienable possession is "po'e". "lo citka be lo funduki" does not mean "the
eater inalienably possessed by a hazelnut"; it means "someone who eats a
hazelnut".

I would not use INAL in all cases of "be".  In the case of citka I'd use DO (direct object) or something.  However, I do think that the alienability distinction, as it usually appears in natural languages (e.g. in terms for kin, body parts, etc.), is nearly always reflected in Lojban place structures and expressed in the alternation between "pe" and "be". In my view, inalienable possession is merely a subtype of a much more general argument/non-argument distinction, whether linguists (or Lojbanists) notice it or not.

As far as "po'e", it's supposed to be a fall-back in case a Lojban place structure fails to capture the inalienable possessor of some word in some culture.  I am not sure how much use it has seen, but I think that if its function is really needed, it would be more fitting simply to coin a new word with the desired place structure.  I would say that "be" is the real inalienable possessor marker in Lojban.

Mike S.

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Apr 26, 2019, 8:15:59 PM4/26/19
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On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 8:45 AM Bob LeChevalier <loj...@lojban.org> wrote:
I agree with the dot instead of the hyphen after "carried" (but not the
URL insert, which I am pretty sure you did not intend). 

Indeed, I did not.

 
> I like my idea of e.g. VPZ .... VPT because abbreviations like VP are
> already widely understood among English-speaking linguists and the
> -Z...-T convention (or something like it) can be used to convey the
> not-widely-understood functions of these Lojban particles, which IMHO
> ought to be one of the points of writing the gloss in the first place.

The latter would seem to be the key issue.  Why are we writing the
gloss? 

I am not sure what Pierre had in mind, but I responded mainly because it just seemed like a fun challenge to gloss a simple example sentence.  FYI, in case there was any possible confusion, maybe I should mention that I have no intention of actually working out a system for Lojban that maximally conforms to the Leipzig glossing rules, complete with abbreviations and "-ive"-suffixed terminology for all the BAI and UI and stuff like that which you mention later.

 
The most usual reason for writing a gloss is to clarify what is
going on for the reader.  The reader in this case is almost always a
Lojban learner and not an "English-speaking linguist" where the latter
word refers to the academic professional field rather than the
learner-of-languages.  Most learners don't know the "widely-understood"
abbreviations, nor the technical terms they represent.  Looking at the
wikipedia list of abbreviations  (
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations> ), I
didn't recognize most of the terms they represent, and I did a
personal-if-amateur study of Comrie's linguistic universals work early
in my Lojban designing effort.  I see no particular advantage in using
words that most people don't know, and especially if we are using them
in ways that only approximate the technical meaning.

I agree that many of those abbreviations would be out of place in learning materials, but (as you indicate later) they might not be out of place in an academic paper that dealt with Lojban, if such a paper were written (I seem to recall at least one such paper being written a long time ago by N. Nicholas).


I thus favor for teaching the language, the introduction of standard
terminology that is specific to the Lojban design, and is not beholden
to academic linguistic norms that learners likely won't know, and
academics would be prone to quibble with (and indeed academics DID
quibble with a lot of the usages that I made, and even more that JCB
made in the original Loglan design).

No matter what approach you take, the learner will need to do some learning.  As an English-speaking learner, I would order my preferences in terminology like this:

Use an English term in a conventional way > Use a neologism or Lojban term > Use an English term in an unconventional way > Use an English term in a bizarre way (e.g. "modal").
As a learner, my way of thinking is like this:
- "brivla" is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stands as either a noun, a verb, or a modifier of another brivla depending on its position in syntax.
- "BAI" is a precise term for a class of Lojban word that stands as either an adverbial preposition or an adverb depending on position in syntax.
- And so on. 

So while some of Lojban syntax is definitely odd in certain details (e.g. the terminators), I think much of Lojban can be understood and described in conventional linguistic terms, and that it's helpful to the learner to do so. 

Regarding "classifier", the WP articles use the term in the narrow sense of counter-word (for countables) as specifically used in Chinese and languages with similar systems; according to WP, even a measure-word (for non-countables) is a different thing.  But WP is not always right and I believe that somewhere or other I have seen "classifier" also used in a much more broad sense to include any word or morpheme that indicates a noun class, though perhaps I am mis-remembering.  At any rate, IMHO, the idea is close enough that type-3 rafsi-prefixes can reasonably be called "classifiers" without a lot of confusion.  So I think we agree on that.  (Also: the CLL uses "classifier" for rafsi-prefixes at least once.)


 
> You can use dots to add features to a gloss.  French "la" might be
> glossed as ART.DEF.FEM and Lojban "loi" might be ART.MASS.

It might, *but* I think that would be an incorrect choice.  The use of
capitalized terms are supposed to be about referencing grammatical
concepts and effects, and not content concepts. 

For clarity and extra information, it is possible to provide two lines of "morphatim" glossing, the upper line using an all-caps abbreviation, and the lower line providing a plainer English translation.

mi nelci la .lojban.
1.SG BRIVLA ART.PROPER CMEVLA
I/me like 0 Lojban.
"I like Lojban"
Actually, I think it could be useful to insert another line of glossing that shows the selma'o (we are not limited to using one or two lines), thereby providing additional information.  However, I think it defeats the purpose of glossing not to also provide English, and not to provide relatively clear and precise glosses of what things mean (whether abbreviations or short translations or both), and how the sentence meaning is composed (not just its abstract syntax).
 

On the other hand, I once proposed to some academic linguists the use of
Lojban as itself a form of linguistic jargon interlanguage for conveying
glosses of other languages and respecting their features.  Lojban in
effect has a superset of most of the features of pretty much all other
languages, even if they aren't conveyed via mandatory grammatical
features in Lojban.  Thus Lojban can convey the complexity of a Nootka
sentence/word as a Lojban tanru or even a many-part lujvo, as well as
the variety of cases in the Finno-Ugric languages.  Using the terms
invented to describe these features in academic descriptions of those
languages limits one to an audience of those who know the language
enough to understand the terms.  Lojban as an interlanguage loses
information about what is conveyed via grammar words vs via content
words in the source language, but might be more effective in conveying
the semantics that result.

Enough for now.  I've essentially denigrated the purpose of Pierre's
original question, which was not what I started trying to do in
answering him.  But it has been a long while since a question came up
here that strongly ties back to the original design concepts of the
language, as well as Loglan/Lojban's ties, both positive and negative,
to the academic linguistic community (which for the most part haven't
had much respect for artificial languages, though I'm not in tune enough
to know whether the attitudes of academic linguistics might have changed
since the 80s when Lojban was designed).

 I enjoyed the read and appreciate the thoughts and exposition of your design philosophy!

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