From mark@xxx.xxx Sat Aug 28 21:37:27 1999
X-Digest-Num: 224
Message-ID: <44114.224.1241.959273825@eGroups.com>
Date: 29 Aug 1999 04:37:27 -0000
From: mark@xxx.xxx
Subject: Relative clauses

I had forgotten/didn't know about the existence of {vu'o} until recently,
and I can certainly see the need for it. But I was a little surprised at
its simplicity. Not the Lojban way of doing things at all. Lojban likes
making parentheses to delimit the scope of things, but here we haven't done
that. How could I say in Lojban "I like men and women and children with
blue eyes", meaning I like all men, and also those women and children who
have blue eyes? {vu'o} won't do the trick; it would apply the relative
clause to all of them. Don't tell me I should re-order the sumti, or I'll
have to think of another example for which that won't work, after hurting
you. I thought maybe a one-element termset could solve the problem, but
you can't attach relative clauses to termsets (which likely is a Good
Thing). I think the way to do it is to use LAhE/LUhU bracketing. In many
simple cases, probably {lu'a}. The downside is that {lu'a} is quantified
by default to "at least one of..." and in this case we'd want "all of". So
it would have to be {ro lu'a}, right?

John, that sound right? There's definitely a need for SOME way to do this
with brackets.

~mark