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Date:         Wed, 13 Dec 1995 16:01:59 -0500
Reply-To: Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>
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From: Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>
Subject:      Re: tech harangue on le/lo
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To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
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pc:
> On opacity, I remember [...] someone
> jumping from the claim that someone was hunting loi <unicorn> to
> the claim that there were unicorns.

That could have been me. :)

> I pass over whether a loi is the
> right thing to be hunting,

In that case, if you don't use {loi}, then there need not be unicorns.
For example

        da kalte lo'e pavyseljirna
        Someone is a unicorn-hunter.

does not say that there are unicorns being hunted.

> to remind (because we did go through
> this less than a year ago) all that "hunt" and its Lojban translations
> create an opaque object position,

Not necessarily, in my opinion. Or are you saying that there is
no way in Lojban to say "That lion, Clarence, is being hunted
by John". If the x2 of {kalte} was always opaque, we could not use
it for the transparent use of "hunt".

I think that "he is hunting lions" in the opaque sense has the same
kind of feature as "he builds houses", in the sense of "he is a
house-builder". There need be no houses to instantiate that claim.
In those cases I use {lo'e zmadi} and {lo'e cinfo}.

> which strictly in Lojban ought to
> have a "subject raising" mark (_tu'o_ ?  not what my list says but I
> seem to recall that the list I have is wrong)

{tu'a}

> unless cancelled (as it
> is not in this case) by an external reference mark (one of those
> _xe'V_ from that discussion).  "Hunt" and the Lojban as well have
> the deep structure of a verb ("get," "kill," "catch," or some such) in
> the scope of a "strive to bring to pass" main verb, so the surface
> object actually comes up two semantic layers, even if no syntactic
> ones.

That may be so, but that does not mean that you can't use the
transparent meaning of those verbs.

Let's say {kalte} means {troci le nu kavbu}, "try to catch".

Then I can say:

(1)     mi troci le nu da poi cinfo zo'u mi kavbu da
        I try that there be a lion such that I catch it.

(2)     da poi cinfo zo'u mi troci le nu mi kavbu da
        There is a lion such that I try to catch it.

Now, which one of those is this:

(3)     da poi cinfo zo'u mi kalte da
        There is a lion such that I hunt it.

I would say that (3) has the meaning of (2). That means that {kalte}
behaves normally, like any other predicate. If (3) means (1), then
we would need to make a list of all the gismu places that have this
weird feature. In my opinion there should be none.

Jorge