From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:54:48 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Mon, 29 Mar 1993 21:04:35 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 9706; Mon, 29 Mar 93 21:03:16 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 5106; Mon, 29 Mar 93 21:04:11 EST Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1993 11:26:28 BST Reply-To: C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Sender: Lojban list Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was cowan@BRADFORD.AC.UK From: C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Subject: Re: TECH: grammar updates X-To: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com To: Erik Rauch Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Mon Mar 29 21:04:35 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: la djan spuda tu'ami di'e sa'enai > I'm fairly sure this is wrong, because I know that BAI and tenses are > not parallel, but I don't have a firm grasp on what's wrong with it, for > two reasons: 1) I haven't yet written the paper on place structures, 2) > I slept very badly last night. I know that there are differences, but I think the parallel does go quite a way. > Your account also fails to explain the "BAI gi ... gi" construction, which > works well for tenses (which do have an implicit 2nd place, viz. the > space-time origin), but may be very shaky for BAIs. I think that in the sense in which tenses do have an implicit second place, so do BAI, but certainly it is not nearly so well-defined. I think there is in fact a FORMAL parallel between tesnes and BAI in all their uses, though the semantics are consistently different. The more I think about it, the more dubious I am about gi ... gi As you say, my account doesn't explain the BAI case - but I don't know what the 'tense' case is about either! It seems to me that gi .. gi will always mean ... .e/je/gi'e bo ... but is distressingly unparallel, in that the logical (or non-logical) connective is not expressed (indeed, cannot be expressed). What does pugi mi gi do cu klama mean? Is it asserting that we both go? mi .epubo do cu klama or *ge mi gipubo do cu klama (not I think currently grammatical) or is it another of these covert raisings as with *mo'u? lenu mi klama cu balvi lenu do go'i I think we should get rid of it, but allow BO after a GI. > This pops up for me when I want to say something universal, but where the > natural gismu seems to want an agent: "Living things are made from cells > [by whom?]", "Set A can be divided into sets B and [jo'u] C [who does the > dividing?]", etc. English gets away with a passive here, because the passive > in English does not commit you to the existence of an agent; not so SE > conversion, which does not eliminate any places. Without this gimmick, > the only way to eliminate places is to make a lujvo and just say "This > obnoxious place doesn't exist in this lujvo". But (as Nick rightly > points out) there then needs to be a way to re-express the meaning of the > lujvo in terms of a tanru. This is dangerous, because it lets malglico in by the back door. 'zbasu' has a maker in its tergismu for good reason. If you don't happen to believe that living things have a zbasu in their history, then it is not appropriate to use 'zbasu'. The argument that 'ne'e zbasu' is a different selbri reeks of sophistry, and looks to me like a way of avoiding thinking about what you really mean. mi'e kolin