Re: Subject: Re: TEXT: pemci

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

>[Indeed, in one respect I think the desire to avoid being malglico
>has gone full cirle and ended up very malglico indeed: I am thinking
>of the lack of any convenient way to make the logically and
>typologically important distinction between singular and plural
>(suhore is a bit of a mouthful) - my reading of this is that it
>results from a desire to be unEnglish, even though number distinctions
>are widespread among languages. Apologies if my guess at the history
>of this is wrong.]   

Which it is, I think.  This dates from the earliest incarnations of Loglan.
A language which is culturally neutral AND metaphysically parsimonious makes
as few assumptions about what distinctions are important as possible.  The
importance of singular/plural is not important in ALL situations in all
languages, likewise tense, likewise individual/mass/abstraction.  JCB
thus had all of these distinctions as optional, with "le" being the closest
we have come from losing that parsimony, since we have added this wide
variety of corresponding values to "le".  There is an implication that
"le" conveys more than it really does, but the nature of "speaker in-mind"
may ultimately reduce to "le" being the general case and the others being
exceptions and specifics.  Indeed, I THINK that is the way JCB uses "le"
in his version of Loglan.

Given this, "lei" is the attempt to distinguish from "le" ONLY the mass vs.
individual distinction, and "lo" ONLY the veridicality distinction, and 
"la" descriptions only the "labelling" distinction.  Number and tense and
abstraction distinctions are made explicit by adding the appropriate words
into the sumti in addition to "le".  We then chose the default quantifiers of
"le" (rather pc did) to be consistent with this.

The fact that su'ore is long bespeaks the fact that it is explicitly marked.
JCB's examples always had it expressed in such a long form - "sutori" (=
Lojban su'oremoi) is one of the words that crept over from JCB's Loglan
into his everyday English - it is the ordinal number "plural" which there is
no English word for.  (JCB made this work with one fewer syllable by making
"su" have two unrelated meanings depending on position, with the grammar
resolved by the lexer - this is a cheat we refused to allow in Lojban.  The
other meaning of "su" was Lojban "so'u".  "ri" was also such a dual-meaning 
word.  Oops, I just checked and "Su" is single meaning, though "ri" is dual
(meaning Lojban "moi" or "so'i").  Sorry 'bout that.

lojbab