Return-Path: Message-Id: <9208300326.AA22656@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Sun Aug 30 02:58:34 1992 Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: le la vei,on ckafyzda srinuntroci xipa X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: CJ FINE's message of Fri, 28 Aug 1992 16:34:30 BST Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Sun Aug 30 02:58:34 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.bitnet!LOJBAN Colin (>) on me (>>) on Veijo >> *sigh*. This is such a common mistake something should be done. A selbri >> can't take {noi}. You can't use it this way in an observative. Use {gi'e} >> or something. >Yes, it is common, isn't it? When I was playing about with the proposals >which eventually engendered Change 20, I was exploring an argument which >said that relatives should be able to be incorporated into a selbri, >along with an idea for preposing both relatives and linkargs there .... >(I didn't mention it because 1) I wasn't sure I could make it work, 2) I >didn't know what to do about "pe/ne" used crucially to attach to a >sumti, 3) I didn't want to give Bob apoplexy.) Yah, it would be nice if we could do something like that, but I don't think there's a way to define it such that it makes sense in general. The problem stems from viewing some brivla as "nouns", so {cukta} is "book" or even "is a book" rather than some sort of verbal (predicative) concept. Think of verbing the noun, and you'll find that a relative clause makes sense pe'iru'e. >> >.i ji'ipano zutse remna >> >> This is fine, but you should realize that it's not quite the same as the >> previous observatives. Observatives are sentences with selbri but no sumti >> (or at least no x1 sumti). The x1 is considered to be ellipsized, so >> "jubme" is "(something unspecified) is a table". This is a sumti with no >> selbri, since it's quantified, and would likely be interpreted as "about 10 >> sitting people (do/are something unspecified)", which to me has a slightly >> different meaning. >Nice point. For consistency, ".i zutse remna ji'ipanomei" or >".i zutse remna selkancu fili ji'ipano", or else >".i kancu le zutse remna li ji'ipano" (I rather like this one) Those work. I'm not dead-set on changing what's there, since that works well for me also, but if we really wanted to avoid selbri-less jufra (which I think are to be avoided in general, though not necessarily to the point of fanaticism), I'd probably rather expand the tanru in the simpler way: .i ji'ipano remna cu zutse Or, keep the tanru and do something like .i zvati fa ji'ipano zutse remna Whatever. ~mark