From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:44:37 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Wed, 2 Jun 1993 00:17:32 -0400 Received: fFrom @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Wed Jun 2 01:38:31 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Wed, 2 Jun 1993 11:40:58 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 6684; Wed, 02 Jun 93 11:40:00 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 9955; Wed, 02 Jun 93 11:40:33 EDT Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1993 08:38:31 -0700 Reply-To: jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Sender: Lojban list From: jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Subject: Re: lojbab doesn't like fi'o X-To: lojban@cuvmb.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 01 Jun 93 23:31:55 EDT." <9306020334.AA26470@julia.math.ucla.edu> Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Tue Jun 1 20:16:50 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: writes: > I myself rather dislike fi'o constructs, which seem popular (at least on the > list) these days. I mean we only put the thing in because we wanted to > keep from having an open-ended set of BAIs. I tend to think of fi'o as > a crutch for people who are trying to capture the sense of a foreign language > closely, where that language has a word that adverbs in a non-BAI manner. > (adverbs non-BAI-ly - now there is an interesting Lojbanization challenge!) Whereas I see them as just another kind of subordinate clause, like with poi. It seems like about a quarter of the time I hit some relation between the main bridi and some other argument, which can't properly be expressed by one of our 65 BAI's. There is one philosophy which says that the potential places of a selbri are infinite in number: certain ones are numbered because they are most useful, but you could attach arguments using any and every BAI, and in a parallel way you could attach arguments in a fi'o clause using any and every selbri, the which are infinite in number. This idea of places is interesting philosophically, but I wouldn't want to have to write a computer program to implement it. An alternative, much more tractable, is to say that only the numbered places are "real". fi'o clauses are, as I said above, subordinate clauses relating the main bridi to zero or more additional arguments. BAI phrases (also tenses) in this model are simply surface representations of a deep structure: fi'o clauses. This is something you can analyse with conventional logic. James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6221 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90024-1555 Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu BITNET: jimc%math.ucla.edu@INTERBIT UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc