From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Tue Mar 17 15:12:17 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Tue, 17 Mar 92 15:12 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA11309; Tue, 17 Mar 92 15:05:18 EST Received: from pucc.Princeton.EDU by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA19602; Tue, 17 Mar 92 14:53:01 -0500 Message-Id: <9203171953.AA19602@relay1.UU.NET> Received: from PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU by pucc.Princeton.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 9724; Tue, 17 Mar 92 14:47:54 EST Received: by PUCC (Mailer R2.08 PTF011) id 4204; Tue, 17 Mar 92 14:47:10 EST Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1992 14:45:01 -0500 Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: A pair of how-do-i-say-it's X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO I've been playing around with some more Lojban phrases in my head, and have a pair of concepts that I'd like to ask about. The first is the use of {cei} and the {bu'a} series. I know that {cei} somehow fills the bill of {goi} and {poi/noi} (really {po'u/no'u}) for selbri, but I've nearly never seen it used. And the {bu'a} series is like the {da/de/di} series (while {brodX} is like {ko'a/fo'a}). So far so good. Here's an example of a sentence I was plying with: George Bush is to the United States what John Major is to Great Britain. (apologies if this steps on anyone's political toes). You can use assorted circumlocutions to get this, but I think you ought to be able to use {bu'a}, since this is really what it's for. Just like {da} asserts "There is some sumti/object/concept/whatever that fills this place", {bu'a} should assert "There is some selbri/relationship that relates these sumti". I had been looking at stuff with {cei}, but near as I can tell nothing works the way I wanted it too, and besides you can do at least as well without it. Tell me: does this work for you?: la djordj. buc. bu'a le merko gugde .i la djan. meidjr. bu'a le brito gugde G.B. is-in-relationship-1-with the american country. J.M. is-in-relationship-1-with the british country. Maybe {.ije} or something? This looks decent to me. Note that it says nothing about the relationship, merely that it's the same for both. Any other ideas? I'd like to avoid circumlocutions that do away with the need for {bu'a}; that's really what I'm interested in learning about. And some examples with {cei}? Anyone have an idea? The other came up in a translation I was thinking about. We have relative clauses to specify sumti, but they only attach to sumti at a fairly low syntactic level. So let's say I mean to say "I meet the man and the woman wbout whom you talked with me." (meaning you talked about *both* of them. And for the sake of argument, I met them separately and unrelatedly, so {.e} would be a reasonable conjunction). This is wrong: mi penmi le nanmu .e le ninmu poi do tavla mi ke'a I meet the man and the woman who-is-such-that you talk [to] me [about] her[the woman] since the {poi} attaches only to the {le ninmu}. I tried using termsets, but *mi penmi nu'i le nanmu nu'u .e le ninmu nu'u poi do tavla mi ke'a I meet (begin termset) the man (end-termset) and the woman (end-termset) which-is-such-that etc... (the two "end termsets" are simply the way termsets work, I don't make it up.) is ungrammatical. The solution I found was with LUhI: mi penmi lu'a le nanmu .e le ninmu lu'u poi do tavla mi ke'a I meet the-individuals-of: the man and the woman (close-LUhI) which-are... Presumably I'd use other members of LUhI and other connectives for meeting them together, etc. Note that the {lu'u} is not elidable here. Is this the best answer? ~mark