From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:59:40 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Wed, 27 Jan 1993 17:13:09 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 5000; Wed, 27 Jan 93 17:11:45 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 8990; Wed, 27 Jan 93 17:11:38 EST Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 17:11:38 -0500 Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: TECH.ADV - non-specific SE X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: C.J.Fine%BRADFORD.AC.UK@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU's message of Wed, 27 Jan 1993 17:36:11 GMT Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Wed Jan 27 12:11:38 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: Hmm. At first glance, Colin's unspecified SE looks very useful and promising. It should be noted, though, that its semantics are a little more powerful than any simple conversion, otherwise I might recommend doing it via {jai do'e} or some such. The proposed SE word indicates not just *an* unspecified conversion, but rather *any number* of unspecified conversions. Another important thing I notice is that it's actually even more than that. Not only do we have arbitrary scrambling of all the sumti places, but even actual *merging* of sumti places, something which isn't otherwise allowed (I recall a discussion involving {bai je va'u} vs. {fe ja fi} and such, but this is conversion, not FA marking). That is, Colin proposes that {le xe'e broda} mean not "the filler of some unspecified place of broda" -- that would be {le jai do'e broda} (hmm. Is there an unspecified FA marker, as distinct from unspecified BAI marker?), but rather "the filler(s) of unspecified place(s) of broda", a rather different affair (see his first example, le xe'e tanru). Note that this makes its semantics very confusing, not so simple as they were before. {mi la mrvn. xe'e patfu} means more than just "Mervyn and I are in some father relationship, each of us filling one role", but rather "Mervyn and I are in some father relationship, each of us filling one or more roles", meaning not just that we may be father and child, or child and father, or mother and father, or mother and child, etc, but also that I may be Mervyn's mother *and* father (nothing terrible about that, recalling that {mi} may be plural), or that I/we may be Mervyn's child and mother of that child, and so on. This may not be a bad thing, but it should be considered. ~mark