Message-ID: <3454B545.6BDA@locke.ccil.org> Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 10:37:41 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: abstractor place structures References: <199710261447.JAA24632@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Status: RO Content-Length: 2382 la xorxes. cusku di'e > "Millar" is like "millon", only 1000 instead of 1000000. > I guess "thousand" is like that, too. What English doesn't have > is a word like "mil". Compare: > > tres gatos three cats > diez gatos ten cats > mil gatos *thousand cats > un millar de gatos a thousand cats > un millon de gatos a million cats This is archaic (18th century and earlier) English, too: "a million of men". We still say "several millions of dollars" sometimes rather than the normal "several million dollars". -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Mon Oct 27 13:22:02 1997 for ; Mon, 27 Oct 1997 13:21:26 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710271821.NAA18988@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral Subject: anti-ka (was: machine translation) X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1156 la lojbab. cusku di'e: > >>? I've never even HEARD of "anti-ka". Sounds toxic. :) > > > >Indeed, I hope lojbab explains what he meant by that. > > I defer to Cowan. You guys talked about this around 2 years ago, and > at some point we decided that we didn't need an explicit construct, > but my only concept of it is as an inverse operation for the abstraction > that is "ka". It goes something like this. "ka"-bridi with a single "ce'u", implicit or explicit, represent properties of an object, and can be applied to the object with "ckaji": "lo broda cu ckaji le ka ce'u broda" expresses a truth for any value of "broda". When we extended "ka"-bridi to represent reified relationships, with multiple "ce'u" markers, there was no way to say "A and B stand in relationship C" where "C" is "le ka ce'u broda ce'u". The "anti-ka" was a proposed device to do this. Several people, including Jorge and I, noted that "bridi" does the right thing: "le ka ce'u broda ce'u kei cu bridi zo'e A ce'o B". -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban