From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Fri Dec 18 04:47:48 1992 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 18 Dec 1992 09:49:00 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4819; Fri, 18 Dec 92 09:48:26 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3104; Fri, 18 Dec 92 09:47:47 EST Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 09:47:48 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: TECH (naive) X-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: Message-ID: This appears to be correct, and indeed was the 'original' way that Loglan did complicated conversions. On the other hand, this type of mental manipulation is a pain, and this was almost immediately determined to be unsatisfactory by the people who read JCB's book. One response was what is now the fa/fe/fi/fo/fu series, the "Hixson-Bonewitz" tags (named after the proposers). We have now gone so far as to note that only rarely does pragmatics rquire you to move more than one sumti. The basic converters let you front any one argument - the one of greatest import, and/or the one you want to be accessed by "le" in a description sumti. All other sumti have no special grammatical advantage, so that the only reason to specify them other than in their natural order is when you wish to leave one elliptical (in which case the "fa" series tags are always more brief than the setese variety of reordering), or when you wish to make one particularly complex sumti trail so that you don't need to worry about terminators (the end-of-sebntence mark is very effective at terminating all open structures of the previous sentence). Again, the "fa" series is more effective. An article in The Loglanist back in the 70's though, included the completely worked out setesetese combinations to generate all permutations of sumti. But the necessity of memorizing something so inherently mind-bending made such an effort more of a mental game than a serious tool. Still. amomg the combinations, "sete", "tese", and "setese" have seen use, and may make it into the dictionary. I can;t see including converter combinations for higher number placess, since they have not seen such use in real text. lojbab