Re: oops! correction

[cowan (John Cowan)]

nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au (Nick S. Nicholas) writes:
> Esp is an AL, but na'e
> logji. Actually, the nicer term to use is no'e logji %^)

Not sure I get it here.  "na'e logji" means "other than logic";
"no'e logji" means "midway between logic and illogic".  I think the first
term is more to the point.

> The insertion of an article before 'how' in Greek (cf. English the whys and
> wherefores) hints at something Esp does at its outer reaches of stylistic
> experimentation, and Lojban doesn't quite do: full euqivalence between
> cmavo and brivla. Oh, sure you have {ma} and {moi}, but they don't seem to
> be general solutions. You can't really say 'the how of it' (* le ta'i ku pe
> ko'a), you have to say method {tadji}. Yes, {ta'i} is just a shortening of
> {tadji}, but you get what I mean.

Full equivalence was never the intent.  The cmavo exist for two reasons:
structure and brevity.  If structure was the only issue, we could get down
to about 125 cmavo (one per selma'o): as it is, about 80 of the selma'o
do indeed have only one cmavo.  Ta'i is not meant to have the full
linguistic power of tadji, but only to be a convenient abbreviation of
it >in certain situations only<, viz. as an aspectual.

> Now for lojban. As I understand it from the lessons (which need some updating:
> I urgently request you post an essay to the list on what has replaced the
> modal relative {mo'u}: is {ne} good enough?),

I presume you mean "no'u".  After the lessons were written, "po'u/no'u" and
"pe/ne" respectively switched places, on the grounds that the more useful
"pe/ne" pair should be shorter.  Each of the members of GOI (other than GOI
itself, which is used for anaphora assignment and isn't closely related)
can be expanded into a relative clause with poi/noi, thus:

	pe -> poi srana (which is relevant to)
	ne -> noi srana (which, incidentally, is relevant to)
	po'u -> poi du (which is equal to)
	no'u -> noi du (which, incidentally, is equal to)
	po -> poi steci (which is specific to)
	po'e -> poi se ponse (which is possessed by)

There were also several other members of GOI on earlier lists which were
never used and have now been removed.

> [A]ll direct interrogatives are
> requests to fill in the blank in a statement. I don't see this reflected in
> the published place structure of {preti}, which is hardly surprising.
> 
> Well let's try this:
> They asked me how to write news.
> They requested that I fill in the blank associated with BAI-word {ta'i}
> in the predicate/statement {zo'e finti le'e nuzba}.
> And let me refashion the place structure of {preti} as
> x1 is a question, wherein x3 requests that x4 provide a valsi to fill in the
> sumti tcita/selbri/attitudinal/whatever denoted by x2 in statement/predication
> x5.
> 
> lemi pendo cu te preti fo mi fe le zoi gic. BLANK gic. fuledi'u zo'e finti
> le'e nuzba vau
> 
> Note that x5 is elidable, so your questions don't have to be relative to an
> explicit predication or context.

I think your x1 and x5 refer to the same thing: the question utterance.
I like this place structure, although lojbab will probably come up with
something wrong with it (he usually does, which is one of the reasons
place structures aren't going to be baselined any time soon!).
One point that comes to mind is that a "preti" isn't necessarily a
>Lojban< question; if I ask "Who are you?", di'e preti.  If the spirit
of the definition is to be kept, the place structure needs to be made
less language-specific.

> fi finti - which is actually quite sensible, though I don't know if the
> analogy to ta'i, from 'third place of finti' to "ta'i place of finti" is
> safe.

As you point out in a later note, this needs to be "te finti".  You simply
have to firmly get in mind the relation between (null)-se-te-ve-xe and
fa-fe-fi-fo-fu.  It would perhaps have been better if there were five
conversions in the same pattern, but it couldn't be done given the
constraints on the CV cmavo stock.

-- 
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban