From lojbab Mon Jul 25 11:01:30 1994 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199407251501.AA09042@access2.digex.net> Subject: Re: ciska bai tu'a zo bai To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 11:01:17 -0400 (ADT) Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net (Logical Language Group) In-Reply-To: <199407222328.7897@krang.vis.mu.OZ.AU> from "Nick NICHOLAS" at Jul 23, 94 09:28:27 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 4419 Status: RO la lojbab. cusku di'e > =In this case, however, Zipf may argue for a reversal of meaning for ga'i, > =since almost all examples of actual usage are of "ga'inai", and a lot more > =people have reason to be obsequious than blatantly pompous. la nitcion. cusku di'e > Ouch; major cultural presumption there. Agreed, but the mere choice to use polar scales and mark only one end (.ui vs. uinai) is a cultural bias. Reversing a scale or two doesn't make much difference. > The story isn't that simple. [...] > relational: > speaker & referent (referent honorific) > speaker & addressee (addressee honorific) > speaker & bystander (bystander honorific) > speaker & setting (formality levels) > absolute: (eg. emperor pronouns; gender pronouns) Is this really absolute? How does the emperor refer to his deceased ancestor: with a god pronoun? What about other emperors? [Korean example deleted] > So what of our ga'i? Oh. I've just realised I've raised the wrong point here; > Lojbab and the others are talking about what the deictic centre of {ga'i} > should be --- that is, what is the honorific relative to: does it mean > "I am honourable relative to the referent" or "the referent is honourable > relative to me". Lojbab's answer is consistent with other UI cmavo; for > the alternative, we might allow {do'a} (or whatever the empathy cmavo is > these days) to shift the deictic centre --- and, since the referents will > often be inanimate, we should take the opportunity to change its definition > to "deictic centre shift". It's "dai". But I think we leave the definition alone: "empathy" is confusing enough without dragging in "deictic reference shift". I will add a note to the paper saying that in some circumstances we attribute emotion (or its analogs) to inanimate objects: le bloti .uudai klama le xasloi The boat [Pity!] [empathy] goes-to the ocean:floor The boat, poor thing, sank. > The reason Lojbab and John wouldn't change it to this when I first talked > of it is that attitudinals are always self-expressions, and so are always > centred on the "self"; "empathy" is something that can still be attributed > to the self, whereas "deictic centre shift" would mean that .o'onaido'a > would mean "He's angry!", not "Oh, I think he's angry" or "He must be angry". I think in the realm of attitudinals proper, this distinction is unreal. You do not >know< that someone else is angry; you infer it from your observation (za'a.o'onaidai) or your intuition (se'o.o'onaidai). > Well, that'll generate some response from Lojban Central. The other thing > we should beware of is not to conflate addressee and referent honorifics. > What does {le patfu cu klama vauga'inai} mean? Does the father outrank me, > or does the person I'm talking to? Neither: see below. > What about {le ga'inai patfu cu klama}? That means that the father outranks you. > Do we in fact have a way of doing addressee honorifics as distinct from > referent honorifics? > > I suspect that, due to the nature of UI cmavo, {ga'i} is a referent honorific > (so father is the outranker in the *second* example), and that the only > way to do addressee honorification is a la tu/vous, by making the addressee > grammatically part of the utterance: {doido'uga'inai le patfu cu klama}. I agree completely. Another, rather less absolute, version is do ga'inai zo'u le patfu cu klama You [who outrank me] : the father goes > What the interpretation of {le patfu cu klama vauga'inai} should be is > a mystery to me. It should *not* be construed as an addressee honorific; > that's playing havoc with UI semantics (such as they are). It can only > mean... that you're honouring the sentence. Not quite: you are honoring the >referent< of the sentence: as you say, we have >referent< honorifics. So you are honoring an event. This probably makes more sense with "ga'i": le xarju cu citka vauga'i The pig ate [which is an event beneath my notice]. > The problem is that attitudinals proper can hang off sentences because they > aren't really relational between two entities: they are centered on the > self. Honorifics don't work like that; they're not about "Oh, I feel humble" > in the same ways as "Oh, I feel happy". They honour someone specific. Yes: this is the difference between "ga'i" and ".o'a". -- John Cowan sharing account for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban.