Message-Id: <199510232131.RAA02678@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Mon, 23 Oct 1995 19:36:35 +0000
Reply-To: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: NAI
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR

Jorge
> > What would a context be for an utterance containing only NAI?
> Probably an answer to a {pei} question.

So not very compelling evidence for wordhood.

> > Is {du'u nai kei} grammatical? What does it mean?
> It's not grammatical. The inside of a du'u is not an "utterance" in
> the jbo-technical sense.
> > > It is of course a word because it meets the Lojban definition of a word.
> > I don't know what that is. But at any rate, I meant "word" in the vague
> > but general way it is understood in linguistics.
> A snappy Lojban definition might be "anything quotable with {zo}".

Yes. That works.

> >  But I do agree that a good case can
> > be made for {zo}, and maybe {bae}, being prefixes.
> Then you'd have to explain why you can say {zo zo} and {zo ba'e} but
> not {zo pre}.

After {zo} you can have an affix or a stem but not a root that is not
a stem. Or something along those lines.

> > At minimum, a word must occupy its own node in syntactic structure,
> > and I was suggesting that NAI doesn't, and is therefore not a word.
> > I gave two reasons. The first is semantic: Lojban in general has no
> > idioms - the sense of a phrase is fully predictable from the meaning
> > of its parts, whereas the sense of a word is not fully predictable
> > from the meaning of its parts. By this criterion, {nai} looks like
> > a suffix.
> Is the sense of {piro} really predictable from the meanings of {pi}
> and {ro}. I would say that that counts as an idiom. Even the sense
> of {pano} needs some convention to arise from the senses of {pa} and
> {no}. Or does a string of PAs count as a single word?

Maybe. But it's more likely that I was wrong to say that Lojban in general
lacks idioms.

> > Second, and more interestingly, UI are in general invisible
> > to other words, but they appear to be visible to NAI. How so? This
> > is accounted for if the bond between UI and following NAI is
> > morphological.
> NAI can follow UI, COI, BAI, most tense words, connectives, and NU.
> It doesn't really have a uniform meaning in all of these positions,
> but I'm not sure why this requires a morphological bond. {uinai}
> is an attitudinal different from {ui} in the same way that
> {to'e gleki} is a selbri different from {gleki}. {gi'enai} is
> a connective like {segi'u} or {nagi'a}. Are {se} and {na} prefixes
> here?

Probably yes. You didn't explain how come UI is visible to NAI. That's
mainly what made me think NAI is a suffix.

And