Re: place switching cmavo...

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

>Date:         Thu, 21 Nov 1996 11:29:12 -0700
>From: Chris A Bogart <cbogart%INDRA.COM@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU>
>
>On Tue, 19 Nov 1996, R.M. Uittenbogaard wrote:
>
>> I always thought the places were numbered subsequently, and
>>
>> fo le dargu cu klama fa mi do lemi zdani le karce
>>
>> meant that "le karce" occupies the x4 place as well, which makes
>> it equal in meaning to:
>>
>> mi klama do lemi zdani le dargu .e le karce   ,  or
>> mi klama do lemi zdani le dargu fo le karce
>>
>> So instead, filled places are skipped for subsequent sumti?
>
>I think you're right and Lojbab is mistaken on this one, but
>I don't have my references here at work to look it up.
>
>I seem to remember a discussion on this where someone suggested
>that (to use your example) le karce and le dargu would act
>like appositives, supposedly naming the same thing (and I
>forget the cmavo which would do this directly: po'u?  no'u?
>something like that maybe...)

Sorry for the long quote and short addition, but it was all relevant.

So far as I remember, it was undefined/semantic error to do something like
"la djan. klama fa la jil. fe le zdani" or otherwise try to cram two sumti
into one place with no appropriate explanation (e.g. conjunction or
something).  What would "le klama be fa la djan." mean?  "John, the comer?"
Hmm.  It sounds like it should be a semantics error: if two things are the
same, use po'u/no'u.  If they both came, use .e/joi/etc.  Is it
semantically legal to do this kind of thing?  (I know it's syntactically
okay).

~mark