From - Tue Dec 16 15:12:38 1997 Message-ID: <3496E0B6.62CE@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 15:12:38 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: multiple ce`u (was: Re: whether (was Re: ni, jei, perfectionism) References: <199712161855.NAA19105@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1153 la .and. cusku di'e > I forgot the possibility of this in my reply to Lojbab. I must > say, I have no idea what, say, {le ka ce`u melbi ce`u zo`e zo`e} > means. Why, it means: "the abstract object which is a dyadic relationship between a beautiful object and those who find it so, relative to some understood aspect of beauty and some understood aesthetic standard." Simple. :-) By counting the "ce'u"s, we find out what the arity (or adicity) of the relationship is. All the other places are filled by the speaker's intent. (Of course, it's all the same whether the bridi ends "zo'e zo'e" or just ""). > I also find it rather worrying that every single empty sumti > within a ka clause could in principle be filled with a ce`u. > And the only way to disambiguate is to fill every single > sumti! Bloody hell! The only way to disambiguate *any* bridi, subordinate or top level, is to fill every single sumti. Otherwise, the speaker depends on the listener's goodwill (or the listener depends on telepathy, as you will). -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban