From - Mon May 06 09:40:17 1996 Message-ID: <318E0141.2D4@ccil.org> Date: Mon, 06 May 1996 09:40:17 -0400 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Win16; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: ambiguity? References: <199605060011.UAA10688@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 759 la paulos. cusku di'e > Consider these two phrases: > > 1. la noi melbi kris. > 2. la noiMELbikris. > > Note that "noiMELbikris." is a simple cmene in 2. > > I claim it is impossible to distinguish between them in > spoken language. Could anybody provide a refutation? > (If not, relative clauses after selma'o LA introduce an > ambiguity in Lojban and should be revised). Your Example 1 is not valid, and needs to read 1a) la noi melbi .kris. Every name-word must be preceded by "la", "lai", "la'i", "doi", or pause; the last case used to be thought rare before new constructs and the recognition of older cases like "la ba'e .djan." and "la .ui .djan.". -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban