From - Tue Feb 20 14:53:53 1996 Received: from wnt.dc.lsoft.com (wnt.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.7]) by mail1.access.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id BAA09535; for ; Tue, 13 Feb 1996 01:29:28 -0500 Message-Id: <199602130629.BAA09535@mail1.access.digex.net> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by wnt.dc.lsoft.com (LSMTP for Windows NT v1.0a) with SMTP id 47A8D5E0 ; Tue, 13 Feb 1996 1:26:20 -0500 Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 03:31:06 -0300 Reply-To: "Jorge J. Llambias" Sender: Lojban list From: "Jorge J. Llambias" Subject: Re: PLI: "except" To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2146 And: >> >> > That is important not only to the Irish. >> Even writing it as: >> la'e di'u vajni ge ro loi se gugdrxeire gi loi ue na'e se gugdrxeire >That's rather dissatisfying. How about: > lae diu vajni ge ro loi se guerxibernia cei broda gi loi nae ue (se?) > broda >Having to repeat {guerxibernia} is inelegant. Yes, but using {cei} is doubly so. :) Anyway, I think that the {se} is not required, because {cei} connects whole tanru. > (I use guerxibernia >because Ireland is not Eire, and not all people of Ireland are people >of Eire.) Then perhaps it should be daplxibernia. I thought Eire was Ireland in Irish, I didn't mean to make a political statement. :) >You're right. I think either you must use some unwieldy circumlocution >or some novel device must be added. No novel devices are going to be >added. So this is something that Lojban just can't do. I think that the way to get {po'o} to have the right effect in the subordinate bridi is to use {po'okau}. After all, what {kau} does for indirect questions is to eliminate the question from the main bridi and restrict it to the subordinate one, which is also what we need for {po'o}. Then we have: ko'a krici le du'u la djan po'okau klama She believes that only John goes. ko'a krici le du'u la djan po'o klama Only John is such that she believes that he goes. But since people have turned down my {po'onai} for "except", I still don't know how to handle that one. >Even if novel devices could be added, I don't think they should be >added with excessive haste, as with {poo}, because the semantics >of these "presuppositional" items like "even" are a bit problematic. They may be problematic, but I hardly think that burying our collective head in the sand is the right answer. Besides, "except" is much simpler than "even". >I'd be happier if Lojban made as little use of them as possible. Well, it won't make use of them if they aren't provided. Every time I've needed to use "even" I used {ji'a}, but always feeling that I wasn't expressing what I wanted to express. Jorge