Message-Id: <m0qFkfm-00001bC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Mon, 20 Jun 1994 10:36:08 -0400
Reply-To:     Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@FINHUTC.hut.fi>
From:         Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: (kau) and (du'u) and (jei)
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
In-Reply-To:  <199406171341.AA08149@nfs1.digex.net> from
              "i.alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk" at Jun 17, 94 02:36:12 pm
Content-Length: 2254
Lines: 59

la .i,n. cusku di'e

> >         mi djuno le du'u by zmadu cy le ka prami dakau
>
> > can mean either:
>
> >         I know B exceeds C in being loved.
>
> > or:
> >         I know in loving whom B exceeds C.
>
>
> 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.

> So
>
> >         mi djuno le du'u by zmadu cy le ka prami da
> means
> >         I know B exceeds C in being loved.
> and
> >         mi djuno le du'u by zmadu cy le ka prami dakau
> means
> >         I know in loving whom B exceeds C.
>
> (Is it time to revisit my "Desperately seeking properties"
> rant from way back at the end of August?  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, 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.  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.

> >         mi djuno le du'u xukau la djan nelci lei plise
>
> > (and the {xu} could even be dropped)...
>
> I'm not sure about dropping the {xu}.  I did once venture
> {nakau} for this (I think it was a private message to Colin).

"xu" really belongs to the same semantic group as "na" and "ja'a", but has
a different grammar so that it can serve to mark constrastive focus as well
as ask a question.

--
John Cowan              sharing account <lojbab@access.digex.net> for now
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban.