Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 13:21:08 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712061821.NAA03515@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Sender: Lojban list From: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Subject: Re: ni, jei, perfectionism X-To: lojban To: John Cowan Status: O X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2099 X-From-Space-Date: Sat Dec 6 13:21:09 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Lojbab: >I just did a grep through various old texts (most more than 3 years old >since I haven't extracted such texts from later mail). >I did not find any instances of YOU Jorge using "jei" in perhaps 15 chunks >of text. Likewise not in several chunks of Goran's text. Of course I don't use it. I discovered {le du'u xukau} fairly early in my learning of Lojban. >I found usages of jei in Nick's texts, several of which could be taken >as pertaining to an indirect question, The question is, did you find ANY that was not an indirect question? My claim was that the little usage that {jei} had was as an indirect questions. >But I suspect that you will find that even here, if there was such discussion, >it occurred in one of the endless arcane discussions that were already >happenming, and no one brought the issue to the attention of Cowan or me, >so that we never became aware of it. I certainly brought the issue to the attention of Cowan, since I'm sure I mentioned it at the time I commented on the refgram drafts. >This shows the weakness of such hypertechnical discussions. They end up >having an effect on the language ONLY of those who plow through them, and >only then if they happen to agree as to the analysis. That's your opinion. In my opinion many people started to use {le du'u xukau} instead of {le jei} thanks to one of those discussions, which happened in this case long before the baselining of the refgram. >But in any case, it does not appear that there has been a lot of usage of >jei in any form since the whole issue of indirect questions was raised. Right. Perhaps that happened as a result of the discussion? {jei} becomes practically useless if not used as an indirect question. >It is possible that the final versions of Nick's text still contain >jei as an indirect question because he did not agree with his critics' >analysis, or because no one ever pointed out that jei was being used for >an indirect question. Nick's texts predate the discussion, I'm pretty sure. Indeed, most of his texts predate my participation in the list. co'o mi'e xorxes