Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 68.230.241.213 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of lojbab@lojban.org) client-ip=68.230.241.213;
Message-ID: <52DC4E78.2050000@lojban.org>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 17:15:20 -0500
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] HISTORIAN/general discussion: po (GOI) and sumtcita
References: <FvUZ1n00q56Cr6M01vUbqw>
In-Reply-To: <FvUZ1n00q56Cr6M01vUbqw>
Reply-To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Precedence: list
Mailing-list: list lojban@googlegroups.com; contact lojban+owners@googlegroups.com
Sender: lojban@googlegroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
X-Spam_score: -0.0
X-Spam_score_int: 0
X-Spam_bar: /

On 1/19/2014 2:28 PM, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> (replies to the main list please)
>
> So it turns out that GOI (goi, ne, no'u, pe, po, po'e, po'u) can
> take sumtcita.  In
> http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK%20Section:%20Subordinators , I
> asserted that for pe and ne (and presumably po, athough I didn't say
> that) this means "sumtcita applies to the relevant sumti", which is
> *HUGELY* useful; using "le broda po fa'a le brodi" in this sense
> comes up *every day* with the jbocifnu, usually in the form of
> "don't pee on the X" :).
>
> So this is a thing in the language that literally *does not appear*,
> even in brief reference, in the CLL.
>
> My questions are:
>
>
> 0.  Can someone who has the old official parse running confirm that
> this works there too and isn't some knid of weird regression?

Nora has confirmed this.

> 1.  Does anyone know, historically, why this works?

Because we thought it might be "hugely useful", though we weren't 
thinking of jbocifnu.  Jorge mentions examples in CLL 9.10.

Here is my thinking through of why (historically) it is so, based on the 
way JCB originally described relative phrases in L1, and considering how 
we got from there to here.  I hope this comes out more or less clear.

GOI attaches a relative phrase, i.e. a sumti, to the main sumti as an 
identifying or incidental modifier.  Unlike a relative clause, there is 
no explicit bridi, nor a relative sumti, because relative phrases are 
degenerative forms of relative clauses.

In English, identifying relative phrases have an implied verb "is" 
(lojban "du")
"the author (who is) Shakespeare ..."
or a possessive (various Lojban bridi from ponse to srana to steci to 
mapti to ckini most of which map to ne/pe)
"the dog (who is) John's" or "the arm of John".

Incidental phrases are largely distinguished from identifying phrases in 
English by context, and sometimes by comma delimiting
"the children who are John's" vs "the children, who are John's,"

Loglan/Lojban broadened these natlang categories somewhat, and added 
explicit markers for alienable/inalienable ownership.  goi itself was 
added for redefinition purposes (implied verb is "hereinafter referred 
to as")

Any sort of thing that could be a grammatical sumti for the implied verb 
can be used on the right side of GOI. sumtcita-tagged sumti qualify, and 
a bare sumtcita also qualifies (with a null implied sumti and implied ku 
added to the implied relative bridi).

You can also use tenses, which are the easiest bare tcita to exemplify:
la lojbab pe ca cu ciska
la lojbab pe ba cu morsi

Thus we allow any sumtcita to follow a GOI, with or without an attached 
sumti.  The tagged sumti (or implied sumti) is an attached place on the 
bridi implied by the GOI.  (Note that we verified that you can even use 
a bare FA tcita, though that seems rather meaningless. "la broda pe fi" ???

> 2.  What should this mean with each member of GOI?  "With X it's
> meaningless don't do that" is a reasonable response; "goi" is an
> obvious target there.

I doubt that we tried to define it with each member of GOI, but if you 
remember that each GOI has an implied relative bridi, along with an 
indication of incidental vs identifying, they should all work out.  The 
tcita sumti is a place on that implied relative bridi.

The vaguest, as implied above, may be "ne/pe" because any of several 
brivla could be implied as the bridi.  But that issue is probably one 
you have to address in defining ne and pe - the use of sumtcita isn't 
the problem.

tcita used with po'u and no'u may be hard to explain to a natlang 
speaker, because we don't tend to think of the two sides of a "du" bridi 
as being taggable.

lojbab

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.