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Date:         Wed, 18 Mar 1992 19:19:59 GMT
Reply-To: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!bradford.ac.uk!C.J.Fine>
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!LOJBAN>
From: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!bradford.ac.uk!C.J.Fine>
Subject:      Re: A pair of how-do-i-say-it's
X-To:         cowan@snark.thyrsus.com
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To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>
In-Reply-To:  <no.id>; from "John Cowan" at Mar 18, 92 9:42 am
Status: RO
X-From-Space-Date: Thu Mar 19 07:04:29 1992
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John Cowan:
>
> It's simply a convention of the language that "<quantifier> bu'a" within a
> prenex quantifies over the relationship; it's not semantically parallel to
> "ro prenu".  To make it otherwise would require magic behavior where "bu'a"
> worked like a sumti within the prenex and like a selbri elsewhere, and
> the grammar simply isn't up to such tricks.  You should think of "ro bu'a"
> as parallel to "ro da".

In a sense, that "magic behaviour" is exactly what you HAVE got - not
that "bu'a" is changing its selma'o, but that the sequence "ro bu'a" has
a completely different semantics - as you say, parallele to "ro da" - in
a prenex from anywhere else.
                        kolin