Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

Philippe Caquant wrote at 2004-04-26 23:55:13 (-0700)
 > I know that some natlangs partially do so, in a rather
 > incomplete, ambiguous and illogical way (because they
 > are natlangs). But I understand Lojban is a conlang,
 > and more, a logical conlang.

I see no reason to think that these languages are any more "illogical"
or "ambiguous" than French or English.  (I have some idea why Lojban
makes these choices, but that question is better left to John Cowan
and other lojbanists)

 > Let me just quote a sentence of Oracle documentation I
 > came across this very morning:
 >
 > "A data model for any application is comprised of
 > entities, associations among these entities, and
 > attributes that describe both the entities and the
 > associations".
 >
 > Well, looks to me that this is very similar to a
 > language. We have entities (essentially, "nouns", at
 > least, "real" nouns, not deverbal ones, for ex); we
 > have associations (I would have said relations; those
 > are essentially "verbs", but of course we have to me
 > more precise about this term further), and we have
 > "attributes", or "properties" (adjectives may be
 > considered as noun properties for ex, and adverbs as
 > verb or whole-predicate properties).
 >

What makes you think that it is any more logical to speak of "fox" as
being an entity than a property?  The entity you refer to as "a fox"
is an entity with the property of being a fox, that it is a member of
the set of all foxes.  It is not the word "fox".


To say that it is brown is to say that is a member of the set of
things that are brown, to say that it jumps playfully over the lazy
dog is to say that it is a member of the set of things that jump
playfully over the lazy dog.  There is nothing logically tying
concepts to syntactic roles.  There is no logical asymmetry between
"the fox is brown" and "the brown one is a fox", despite your calling
"fox" an entity and "brown" a property.

Reply