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Date:         Tue, 16 Sep 1997 13:51:52 GMT+0
Reply-To:     And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>
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From:         And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>
Organization: University of Central Lancashire
Subject:      Re: negated nitcu
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To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
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From:          "Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
> Ho hi all.  A blast from the past: a post that talks (gasp) about the
> semantics of Lojban.
>
> My two-year-old son has taken a great liking to Raffi, the famous singer of
> children's songs (I think he's Canadian).  For inexplicable reasons, Raffi
> annoys me significantly less than quite a few other children-song singers,
> though of course he can wear on you after a while (the purple dinosaur,
> meanwhile, doesn't get mentioned by name in my house, except by the kid
> who's too young to know better).  At any rate, one song I'm finding myself
> forced to listen to all to often has a bunch of lines like "I don't need
> a(n) X to Y."  e.g. "I don't need a lumberjack to pour my milk," "I don't
> need a radio to sing a song," "I don't need a dinosaur to eat me up."

The dinosaur one is easy:

   mi na nitcu loi nu lai dinosaur mi citka

(pragmatically implying, of course "mi nitcu loi nu lai
dinosaur mi na citka").

The lumberjack one could be rendered as:

  loi nu mi [pour] [milk] kei na nibli (tu`a) lai lumberjack

I don't think the difference in selbri is crucial.

"I need a lumb to pour my milk" means "(the assistance of) a
lumberjack is necessary to my pouring of my milk".

So unilke you I don't see the difference as pertaining to
negation so much as to an ambiguity in the English between
whether the to-infinitive is taken as a purpose adjunct
controlled by the subject [lumberjack ex] or as a complement
controlled by the object [dinosaur ex].

--And