From lojbab Sat Mar 6 22:55:47 2010 Subject: Re: (kau) and (du'u) and (jei) To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu From: lojbab Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 10:36:07 -0400 (ADT) Cc: lojbab (Logical Language Group) In-Reply-To: <199406171341.AA08149@nfs1.digex.net> from "i.alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk" at Jun 17, 94 02:36:12 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2238 Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Mon Jun 20 10:36:07 1994 X-From-Space-Address: lojbab Message-ID: 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 for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban.