Re: TECH (naive)

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

This appears to be correct, and indeed was the 'original' way that Loglan did
complicated conversions.  On the other hand, this type of mental manipulation
is a pain, and this was almost immediately determined to be unsatisfactory
by the people who read JCB's book.  One response was what is now the
fa/fe/fi/fo/fu series, the "Hixson-Bonewitz" tags (named after the proposers).

We have now gone so far as to note that only rarely does pragmatics rquire
you to move more than one sumti.  The basic converters let you front any one
argument - the one of greatest import, and/or the one you want to be accessed
by "le" in a description sumti.  All other sumti have no special grammatical
advantage, so that the only reason to specify them other than in their
natural order is when you wish to leave one elliptical (in which case the
"fa" series tags are always more brief than the setese variety of reordering),
or when you wish to make one particularly complex sumti trail so that you don't
need to worry about terminators (the end-of-sebntence mark is very effective
at terminating all open structures of the previous sentence).  Again, the "fa"
series is more effective.

An article in The Loglanist back in the 70's though, included the completely
worked out setesetese combinations to generate all permutations of sumti.
But the necessity of memorizing something so inherently mind-bending made
such an effort more of a mental game than a serious tool.

Still. amomg the combinations, "sete", "tese", and "setese" have seen use,
and may make it into the dictionary.  I can;t see including converter
combinations for higher number placess, since they have not seen such use in
real text.

lojbab