Return-Path: Message-Id: <9110232353.AA22662@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Thu Oct 24 12:57:28 1991 Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc Sender: Lojban list From: cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc Subject: Re: More on place structures X-To: lojban@cuvmb.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 23 Oct 91 15:14:00 EDT." <9110232003.AA26596@julia.math.ucla.edu> Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Thu Oct 24 12:57:28 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN "61510::GILSON" writes > I want to say "I like to travel by train better than by bus or plane. litru = "x1 travels via route x2 by transport modality x3". The sticking point was that the route is considered an essential place of litru-travel (or alternative choices of gismu); how to insure that a different route is allowed for each mode? Quantification is done left to right, so if the modes are in the form of a conjunction with .e, subsequent instances of "da", and presumably also "zo'e", will have referents selected independently in each expanded sentence, which is what you want. I have trouble to give the example, because traji = "x1 is superlative in property x2". What I'm used to is this form: "x1 is (one of) the extreme member(s) of set x2 in property x3". (Possibly plural if several tie for first place.) It is implied by mental telepathy (or in the -gua!spi version, by annotations in the dictionary that the parser sees) that you are supposed to plug members of x2 into x3 one by one -- therefore the route within x3 will be selected independently. With this place structure, a maximally pedantic translation is: loi trene cu traji ri ce loi vinji ce (mass) train extreme this (train) set-and mass plane set-and loi so'ikarce le ni mi se zdile loi nu mi litru [fe zo'e] fi ke'a mass many-car amount I am amused mass event I travel [route] on it In Lojban (I think) and -gua!spi (I'm sure), it's generally impractical to split up the set argument like we do in English, or alternatively, to assume that when you say "than by bus or plane" it somehow means to repeat the original sentence with other members substituted. An artificial intelligence would have to do a lot of specialized computation to evaluate traji-extreme, compared to simpler selbri such as litru. Sorry about so'ikarci = bus; it's kind of lame but... Another definition problem: I couldn't locate a decent translation of "like" or "enjoy". zdile-amuse was the closest I could get. -- jimc