Re: [bpfk] BPFK work

[Daniel Brockman <dbrockman@gmail.com>]

Sorry if the formatting in this message doesn't come out perfect.

On 11 okt 2010, at 15:03, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 6:04 AM, Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> wrote:
>> I consider myself a pretty pedantic {i}-user, but even I
>> only start with {i} if the first thing I'm saying is a bridi.
>
> I'm still trying to figure out where the idea that starting your part of the conversation without an ".i" is somehow less than perfect Lojban. [...] Where does this notion that conversations are single parsable units rather than exchange of
> parsable units come from?

I simply think of {i} as starting a sentence instead of separating
sentences. I don't think I got this idea from anywhere in particular;
for some reason I just prefer to think of it that way. I guess to me
it fits with the rest of the language, or something?

The primary reason is probably that we  stick modifiers on the {i} to
modify the following sentence. Hence my mind casts {i} as the
sentence-opener.

Sometimes I will leave out the initial {i} and in those cases I don't
think of the first part of my utterance as a sentence: it's sort of
just some interjections before I begin my proper sentences.

Again, I'm just describing how I personally think of it. I absolutely
agree that a text need not start with {i}.

>
>> I don't start with {i} if the first thing I'm saying is, e.g., a UI.
>> When I start with a UI, it sort of attaches to my whole text.
>> It definitely does not attach to the end of some other text.
>
> An initial UI doesn't syntactically  attach to anything, because
> there's nothing to its left for it to attach to. What its "object" is
> (when it requires one) depends on the context. In some cases its
> object is what has been said before. I don't think the object is very
> often the whole following text when it gets separated by an ".i".

I agree.

>
>> I still think the explicit marker cmavo would be useful.
>
> Could be, so that would become:
>
> A: mi klama lo ...
> B: di'ai zarci
>
> That in fact would reinforce the idea that unless it is marked
> otherwise, B's text is their own, not (partly) someone else's. And in
> that case the text to feed to the parser is "mi klama lo zarci", with
> "di'ai" removed. This is the "twins completing each other's sentences"
> kind of situation. But it shouldn't be the default.

Agreed.

>> I'm not sure how to express explicit non-continuation, though.
>> Maybe the explicit marker has a *required* NAI following it?
>
> Or it could be a different word, say "ni'oi". But it would really be
> redundant in most cases.

Agreed. We could just call it {ni'o ze'ei di'ai} or something. It'll
be so rare that six syllables is fine.

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