From cowan@ccil.org Thu Oct 18 12:17:25 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-members); Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:17:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from earth.ccil.org ([192.190.237.11]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1Iiarx-00082N-I2 for llg-members@lojban.org; Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:17:25 -0700 Received: from cowan by earth.ccil.org with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1Iiarr-00052e-QG for llg-members@lojban.org; Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:17:15 -0400 Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:17:15 -0400 To: llg-members@lojban.org Subject: [llg-members] Re: LLG AGM 2007: New Business Message-ID: <20071018191715.GA19091@mercury.ccil.org> References: <20071016202338.GL5630@digitalkingdom.org> <20071016213405.GG28745@mercury.ccil.org> <20071016213807.GO5630@digitalkingdom.org> <20071016220537.GI28745@mercury.ccil.org> <20071016222008.GK28745@mercury.ccil.org> <4715D3E3.5000003@gmail.com> <20071018132508.GD15126@mercury.ccil.org> <47179EF7.5060902@lojban.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <47179EF7.5060902@lojban.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) From: John Cowan X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 450 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: cowan@ccil.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: llg-members@lojban.org X-list: llg-members Bob LeChevalier scripsit: > Sometime between that decision (pre November 1980) and when I started > documenting Lojban, pc came to the opinion that the internal quantifier > was su'o rather than ro. I can't be sure that he did so because of > a change in JCB's thinking, his own thinking, or something I said in > our discussions (I remember that I attached much significance to the > symmetry in the quantifiers - "su'o le ro" and "ro lo su'o". The trouble with all this, of course, is that it makes lo's inner quantifier basically useless: "su'o" just says it can't be empty, but using an explicit number is almost always the Wrong Thing. That's IIUC what inspired xorlo. > The one thing that is clear in my recollection and notes was the > veridicality of the description. I don't think "lo" was inherently > non-specific at first - indeed the word "specific" never came up, > but when it finally did, I figured that if specificity was important, > people would prepend a le + quantifier on the front ("le pa lo broda") > to make it explicitly specific because "in-mind" and "quantified", > and they would use a quantifier with no gadri for non-specific ("pa > broda" or "su'o broda" for a non-specific quantifier as well). "Specific" was a term introduced by And and Nick from standard linguistic terminology as a substitute for "in-mind", with my enthusiastic concurrence. > At this point I will stop because if I haven't done so yet, I will > probably muddle something up. But my point, I think, is that "specific" > wasn't part of the verbiage we originally used in the design, and if > the gadri have developed a specific/non-specific distinction, it is > probably because of the habits of the primarily-English speakers who > looked for and found such a distinction. In fact English doesn't grammaticalize the +specific/-specific distinction, nor do most IE languages. Instead, it grammaticalizes +definite/-definite ("definite and indefinite articles") which is similar but definitely not the same. -- First known example of political correctness: John Cowan After Nurhachi had united all the other http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Jurchen tribes under the leadership of the cowan@ccil.org Manchus, his successor Abahai (1592-1643) issued an order that the name Jurchen should --S. Robert Ramsey, be banned, and from then on, they were all The Languages of China to be called Manchus.