Message-ID: <3145D8FF.6DF3@ccil.org> Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 15:05:19 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Win16; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Ordinal ROI: the very idea! Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1922 Lines: 54 Content-Length: 1891 Lines: 51 Content-Length: 1859 Lines: 48 Ever since Jorge proposed an ordinal analogue to ROI, such that 1) mi pare'u klama le zarci I for-the-first-time go-to the store was grammatically equivalent to 2) mi paroi klama le zarci I once go-to the store the idea has been bothering me, but I was never able to pin down just why. Now I understand the problem. *(BTW, "re'u" was reserved for this function but never made it onto the official cmavo list.) "roi", like its vaguer equivalents in TAhE, specifies a property of the time (or space) interval over which the event of a bridi stretches. It is, in some sense, an ancillary claim: Example 2 means that during the (default, vague) time interval of the main claim, I go to the store exactly once. In Example 1, however, the effect of the "pare'u" is restrictive; it picks out the first event within the main interval and makes it what the whole bridi is about. This makes "re'u" not operate as an interval modifier with respect to subintervals. Intervals subdivided with "roi" can be sub-subdivided by using a ZAhO and/or more "roi"/TAhE, for arbitrarily fine precision. "re'u" doesn't fit into this system. Instead, its function is really parallel to that of tanru modification: 3) le nu mi klama le zarci cu krefu fi li pa The event-of my going to the store is-the-repetition numbered-1 [of some stream of my goings to the store] is really what is meant. Indeed, a different x2 would give a different stream; if I am juror #5, then my book about the trial may be "krefu fi li mu" in the sequence of books about the trial. So while the parallel between "roi" and "re'u" is tempting, I believe that it is not necessary to have "re'u", nor does it fit well into the ROI selma'o. Comments are urgently solicited. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban