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Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 17:17:07 -0600
To: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>
From: sbelknap@uic.edu (Steven M. Belknap)
Subject: pensyrespa
Status: OR
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mi cusku dihe
>> mi lekmau do lo kelvo be li pimu
>>
>> (Presumably mi and do refer here to sentient lizards, or other
>> poikilothermic persons.)
>
la djan cusku dihe
>Ouch!  Obviously a mixture of different versions here.  1.1 is canonical,
>1.2 is
>almost right, and 1.3 is totally bogus.
>
>(But you don't need to be poikilothermic to differ in temperature by five
>kelvins: one of you is hypothermic, that's all.)

Actually, this utterance would be impossible for an hypothermic human.
Living in the midwest, and attending to the care of street people, I have
had several patients with that degree of hypothermia. Physiologically, 5=B0C
is a *big* deficit. Enzyme reaction rates are nearly halved. Coma is an
invariable consequence. So the <mi> of the statement could not be human,
because comatose humans do not construct utterances. Actually,
poikilothermy is a fuzzy concept. Fish and reptiles *can* partially
regulate their internal body temperatures through several means, such as
variable muscular activity (demonstrated in tuna), rete mirable or other
countercurrent heat exchange mechanisms or by seeking environmental sources
or sinks of heat. I actually like the idea of pensyrespa, though. Maybe
lojban is the lost language of the dinosaurs... :-)

>
>> Another possibility would be to build on the
>> previous examples given earlier in the paper:
>>
>> le bisli ku lekmau le djacu zohe lo kelvo be li mu
>
>Actually it's "le bisli cu lekmanu le djacu le ni kelvi li mu".
>
>> Query: Why use cu, isn't it more instructive to use le...ku pairs?
>
>Using "cu" is a stylistic choice that's compatible with most of our
>intermediate materials.
>

Could be. But for beginners, I think it is confusing to use cu in this way.
Doesn't your sentence work only because <bisli> and <djacu> are one-place
gismu? Wouldn't you need a <ku> to prevent a multi-place sumti from sucking
up the rest of the utterance? Either <ku> or <cu> may be elidible in many
expressions, but the early introduction of <le...ku> illustrates an
important simple construct: how to parethensize sumti, which is not well
explained in the reference grammer texts, though it is explained in one of
the old lessons (Lesson 2?). I would argue for supporting it early in the
textbook.

A word on getting these files. I think I have most of the ones uploaded,
but I'm confused about currency, and have several versions of some files

I can sometimes get to

ftp://powered.cs.yale.edu/pub/lojban/draft/refgrammar/

I only very rarely can get to

ftp://ftp.access.digex.net/pub/access/lojbab/jvoplace.txt

=46irst of all, if you try to ftp all the way down to the subdirectory, you
get a message "anonymous access denied" If you try to just ftp to the site,
it hangs most of the time. I was able to get into it once in December, and
quickly downloaded everything in sight, but its apparently fubared at
present. Just tried again I got:

=46TP Error

Could not login to FTP server

User anonymous access denied.

The spirit is willing, but the web is weak.

cohomihe la stivn


Steven M. Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria

email: sbelknap@uic.edu
Voice: 309/671-3403
=46ax:   309/671-8413