Re: jei

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

> >I really don't see what is malglico about {le du'u xukau}, it seems
> >to me to be very Lojbanic, making indirect questions more regular in
> >Lojban than they are in English. If anything, I'd say using {jei} for
> >"whether" is malglico, because it tends to make Lojban have the same
> >irregularity that English has in having a special word for the yes/no
> >indirect question.
>
> Nora would probably disagree, and she invented kau if I recall.  She even
> considers calling them "indirect questions" to be malglico, and preferred
> to use null/netral values like"dakau"instead of "makau"  I would have to
> dig to find out, but I think she had examples where she thought thinking of
> these things as a form of 'question' was misleading as to their nature.
> You on the other hand seem to feel that indirection always implies a question.
> No easy way to settle it. So lets just agree to disagree until we can find
> an example where each other's understandings do not work.  I'll leave the
> "kau" line in the cmavo list unchanged for the nonce.

Kau certainly seems glico to me, but I don't know about mabla.
Kau works in virtually the same way as English interrogative pronouns
that don't have the illocutionary force of questions.
Does anyone have any idea how to render "indirect" interrogatives into
predicate calculus? Wouldn't that settle the question of whether kau
is malglico (or whether, instead, English is zabna logji)? [& into
the bargain I would learn how to analyse English]

---
And