Re: THEORY nouns and cases

John Cowan:
> Ray Brown scripsit:
> > But lojban, like Loglan, was based, I thought, on clausal form logic
> > and, indeed, in order to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it was
> > purposely designed not to be like a natlang. Also, of course, altho
> > lojban describes 'lo cribe' as you say (and you should know  :) it is
> > possible that a linguist could analyze it as 'lo' being a substantiver,
> > i.e. in 'lo cribe', 'cribe' has indeed been substantivized & is a noun.
>
> It's possible, but you'd have to ask a real linguistician (And, perhaps)
> whether that analysis is at all plausible.
I do not assent to the (flippant, I hope) notion that the class of
real linguisticians includes me but not John (or Ray), but seeing as
I am mentioned...

I take the minoritarian view that word classes (parts of speech) are
language-specific rather than universal. The analysis of the word
classes of Language X can be based on evidence only from Language X
itself. One can recycle terminology used for describing Language
Y and apply it to X, but this recycling has no analytical force.
Therefore, ***IMHO***, it is meaningless to debate whether cribe is
a 'noun' (unless 'noun' is given a Lojban-specific definition); and
furthermore, there is no compelling reason from Lojban grammar to say
that cribe changes word class when subordinated to lo. That's only
IMHO, though.

--And.