Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 09:14:57 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199709161414.JAA01556@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Organization: University of Central Lancashire Subject: Re: negated nitcu X-To: LOJBAN@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1542 Lines: 37 From: "Mark E. Shoulson" > 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