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Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 14:27:05 +0200
From: selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Speaker specificity: {.i da'i na vajni}
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la .and. cu cusku di'e
> On 29 Sep 2014 01:40, "Pierre Abbat" <phma@bezitopo.org
> <mailto:phma@bezitopo.org>> wrote:
>  >
>  > On Sunday, September 28, 2014 12:03:18 selpa'i wrote:
>  > > As for old-{voi}, I agree it's utterly useless.
>  >
>  > I don't think so. It has its place, though I don't see much use for
> it. {lo
>  > rangutano cu me lo remsmismani voi se kerfa lo xunre bunre} allows an
> ape to
>  > still be an orangutan even if it's albino.
>
> On further consideration, I agree it's not useless. But

You can find a possible use case for anything if you try hard enough. In 
practice, however, I have never needed {voi}, and nobody else uses it 
more than once per year. Not being a primitive, in the rare cases that 
it is needed one can always use a full form involving a predicate. (see 
below)

> (1) For every relative, noi, poi, ne, pe, no'u, po'u (that list from
> memory -- hope it's right) a nonveridical counterpart would be at least
> as useful as voi--poi is.

To me this just shows that "non-veridicality" should just be a predicate 
(from which you can define a UI or tag if necessary), so that you don't 
have to make non-veridical versions of everything.

If there is a predicate (currently {skicu} seems to come closest) then 
neither {voi}, nor any of the hypothetical non-veridical counterparts of 
the GOI you mentioned is necessary.

> (2) It's nonveridical noi that would figure in a logical expansion of le
> and English definite descriptions, so is a candidate for usefulest.

I think the whole notion of veridicality and non-veridicality is 
overstated. Human speech tends to be metaphorical in general, so I don't 
think something like that should be a feature of a gadri, because that 
would limit it to sumti. A predicate, UI or tag on the other hand can be 
used anywhere.

For the definite description nature of {le}, which is its main purpose, 
non-veridicality is irrelevant, and it would more likely to be defined 
in terms of quantifiers in a formal logic.

> Selpa'i has suggested a UI for (non)veridicality. The snag with that is
> that you'd not want the unmarked default to be "unspecified
> veridicality", and usually you'd want the unmarked default to be
> Veridical, but sometimes, specifically when the phrase has an
> identificatory function, you want the unmarked default to be
> Nonveridical. So this leads me to think that maybe better than a UI
> would be a nonveridical poi'i, or maybe a nonveridical poi'i that
> includes co'e in its meaning. You could even use /voi/ for that, tho not
> at the cost of depriving poi'i of a shorter allomorph.
>
> I'm kind of brainstorming here, not presenting a decidedly optimal change.

I think a predicate ({skicu} and related words like {simsa} and {simlu}) 
is all that is needed to capture non-veridicality.

Instead of {lo broda voi brode} you can always say {lo broda noi/poi mi 
skicu ke'a fo lo ka brode} and {noi simlu lo ka brode}. As this is 
something that is relatively rarely needed, it doesn't matter that it 
doesn't have a shortcut cmavo. But that's just my opinion.

mi'e la selpa'i mu'o

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