From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Tue Jun 21 13:50:45 1994 Message-Id: <199406211750.AA14130@nfs1.digex.net> Date: Tue Jun 21 13:50:45 1994 Reply-To: i.alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk Sender: Lojban list From: i.alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk Subject: Re: (kau) and (du'u) and (jei) X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Bob LeChevalier Status: RO la xorxes. spuda tu'a mi di'e > > So we could simply use a parallel construction with {ka}. > > > > lo'e kanba cu zmadu mi leka tu'okau da tuple de > > Goats have more legs than me. > I liked it at first, but I think even this use conflicts with indirect > questions. > mi djuno le du'u lo'e kanba mi zmadu le ka xokau da tuple de > Could mean: > 1- I know that goats have more legs than me. > 2- I know the number of legs which beleg us (each of me and > the goats), I being in this property surpassed by the goats. > (Or something like that.) We've always got this problem with nested constructs. mi cusku le se du'u do djuno le du'u dakau bebna 1) I say that you know who is foolish 2) I say who you know is foolish and there's a workaround using subscripts - I think the above is (1) and (2) is mi cusku le se du'u do djuno le du'u dakau xipa bebna but I need to bring myself up-to-date with the latest version of the abstraction paper. la djan. spuda tu'a mi di'e > > No, the property disambiguator is just plain {da}. > That was my original idea. However, I've since become convinced that the > effort of finding a hitherto-unused variable may become too bothersome, > in contexts where "da"s, "de"s, and "di"s are already flying about. > So I adopted someone's suggestion of using "kau" in this additional manner. Pity - that scuppers my idea of using {ka} with DA (argument) and {kau} (result). I'm not convinced about the shortage of DAs, but let's not pursue this too far until I've reread the abstraction paper. > > John Cowan threatened > > to respond to the "properties" half, but to the best of my > > knowledge never did.) > Right, and mostly because it seems to me that you are correct, If you thought I had a good idea, why did you make it impossible? :-) > but the > more I thought about the matter, the more muddled I got. Someone needs > to rethink the whole question of abstraction, preferably in conjunction > with a close reading of my draft paper on the subject, which glosses over > a great deal. I don't promise to redesign the whole system :-), but I've started reading the new version of the paper, and I'll get back to you. > The trouble is that we inherited the nu-ka-ni distinction > from JCB, who had (has?) no other abstractors, and the remaining ones were > added in a most ad-hoc fashion, sometimes with random changes -- thus > "du'u" did not originally distinguish between proposition and text (now > "sedu'u"), and in fact very early on wasn't NU at all -- it was the > grammatical equivalent of LE+NU and was usable only with MEX sentences. Yes, NU is a bit miscellaneous. Unfortunately it's a bit late to redesign from the ground up, even if we knew how. :( co'o mi'e .i,n.