kau

[Gerald Koenig <jlk@NETCOM.COM>]

And said:

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
**********
>From djer:
Well, I haven't really though this through, so it may be the blind
leading the blind, but I can't resist And's interesting questions.

The word list gives us an example, " I know WHO went to the store" as an
appropriate usage for kau. "Who went to the store?" would be an
interrogative use of who, but here I see it as a personal relative
pronoun. As such it could be written with the 'universal' relative
pronoun, "such that", giving "I know something (x) such that it went to the
store"  or mi djuno da zo'u da pa klama lo zarci. Interestingly enough
my search didn't find any exact equivalent for "such that"; instead it
seems to be enough just to use zo'u which means begin new related
utterance. Anyway "da zo'u da" has come to be equivalent to "dakau" here
if i. mi djuno dakau pa klama lo zarci is good lojban. Is the da on
dakau necessary?

Dropping into predicate calculus I get:

E(a)E(x)E(y){ & person(x) & market(y) & went(x,y) & (a=I) & knows(I, x)}

There is really nothing interrogative about this. It just claims x went
to the market and I know x. The listener will have to ask if he wants to
know who the mysterious x is. It could be xe'o one.

Does this make any sense to you, And?

djer