Re: Rubin

Hmm... how about a conlang which has an inventory of patterns of
combination, such as a "giving pattern" <giver> <act of giving>
<recipient> <gift> or "generic action pattern" <agent> <action> or
"generic two-value action pattern" <agent> <action> <patient> --
allowing those slots to be filled with anything that is semantically
appropriate.  That way, the slot-patterns don't have to belong to the
vocab, and each vocab item doesn't have to have one and only one
associated slot-pattern.

Wait a minute.

That's not a conlang.  That's English. :)

Ed

>It reminded me of Lojban, and to me has the same problem.  I found
>Lojban too hard to learn because of all the extra information you
>had to attach to each vocabulary entry.  It's not enough to learn
>the meaning of the term, but also all the associated arguments.
>
>As Nik Taylor suggested, it would be more natural to have several
>fixed patterns, and then you'd only need to learn which pattern a
>given word fits into.  I've been working off and on for some time
>on a language that does just that, called Saambu.  I read the
>recently published Lojban Grammar, and Saambu is intended to be
>Lojban after its been spoken as a natural language for a few
>generations.
>
>It may be that there are recognizable patterns in the Lojban
>arguments, I just never got good enough to recognize them.
>
>-- Terry Donnelly
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