Re: NAI

[jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU]

And:
> What would a context be for an utterance containing only NAI?

Probably an answer to a {pei} question.

> Is {du'u nai kei} grammatical? What does it mean?

It's not grammatical. The inside of a du'u is not an "utterance" in
the jbo-technical sense.

> > It is of course a word because it meets the Lojban definition of a word.
> I don't know what that is. But at any rate, I meant "word" in the vague
> but general way it is understood in linguistics.

A snappy Lojban definition might be "anything quotable with {zo}".

>  But I do agree that a good case can
> be made for {zo}, and maybe {bae}, being prefixes.

Then you'd have to explain why you can say {zo zo} and {zo ba'e} but
not {zo pre}.

> At minimum, a word must occupy its own node in syntactic structure,
> and I was suggesting that NAI doesn't, and is therefore not a word.
> I gave two reasons. The first is semantic: Lojban in general has no
> idioms - the sense of a phrase is fully predictable from the meaning
> of its parts, whereas the sense of a word is not fully predictable
> from the meaning of its parts. By this criterion, {nai} looks like
> a suffix.

Is the sense of {piro} really predictable from the meanings of {pi}
and {ro}. I would say that that counts as an idiom. Even the sense
of {pano} needs some convention to arise from the senses of {pa} and
{no}. Or does a string of PAs count as a single word?

> Second, and more interestingly, UI are in general invisible
> to other words, but they appear to be visible to NAI. How so? This
> is accounted for if the bond between UI and following NAI is
> morphological.

NAI can follow UI, COI, BAI, most tense words, connectives, and NU.
It doesn't really have a uniform meaning in all of these positions,
but I'm not sure why this requires a morphological bond. {uinai}
is an attitudinal different from {ui} in the same way that
{to'e gleki} is a selbri different from {gleki}. {gi'enai} is
a connective like {segi'u} or {nagi'a}. Are {se} and {na} prefixes
here?

Jorge