Stela Selckiku wrote:
On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:But in case it is relevant, I have not seen any mention of fa'o, the reserved cmavo that explicitly indicates the end of a piece of text (in the sense of the largest parsible unit), but which I believe is found in no formal grammar and is almost never used. It was specifically conceived for situations where one knows that what one is saying cannot parse as a continuation of what has gone previously, but has been superfluous in Lojban parsers which were designed to inherently assume a single text.Oh right, {fa'o}! I guess we already have that direction, then, and we just need its opposite perhaps. Incidentally, {fa'o} is rather often used these days! Some of us have started using it on Twitter and other microblogging sites, to separate the Lojban text from any mentions or tags that follow it, like: "mi tavla fo lo melbi fa'o #lojban #conlang @lojbab"
Since I am a fossil who doesn't use a cellphone, much less Facebook, Twitter and all that new stuff, I am not sure what all that is about, but I'll believe you %^)
Nora and I have been reading along in this thread now, and I think we understand what the issue is, and see one ramification that has not been mentioned. She mentioned in IRC where there may be several conversations going on at once. I wish to reply to someone effectively continuing the "text" that is comprised by the various exchanges in the conversation. Clearly such an explicit continuation needs to be a vocative (selma'o COI). Only when there is one single other
"speaker" that could be continued would it not need to be a vocative.So I do NOT like using UI, because it has no way to indicate WHAT you are continuing.
The first question in my mind (as a linguistic conservative) is whether any of the existing COI vocatives would be sufficient. I could make an argument that ta'a as a vocative implies that you are breaking into and interrupting an existing text (an what follows is probably something unrelated and thus a different "text"), so "ta'anai" could be understood as explicitly not interrupting the existing text but rather continuing whatever the person addressed was saying.
(Of course, if ta'anai has acquired some other usage, that won't work). If not ta'a, could any of the others work?If none of them are quite what is wanted, I will admit that I am more amenable to adding cmavo to the COI selma'o than probably any other, especially if they are protocol-related as this is, because we knew from the beginning that we had not covered all conversation protocol issues.
The other observation is that whatever we are trying for is metalinguistic in nature, and thus can probably be expressed using SEI. (sei jmina [se'u] being the first possibility that comes to mind, but not necessarily the best. Unlike UI, SEI with the right bridi can express what you are adding onto. And there can be multiple options, one bridi expressing that you are completing the other person's sentence and a different one expressing that you are picking up where they left off, etc).
If people used metalinguistic expression or this sort for now, it would be easier to argue on the basis of *usage* that a particular metalinguistic cmavo is needed. But the norm seems to be to coin an experimental cmavo rather than trying to stick within the confines of the defined language.
(I can live with either approach, but I have never paid attention to experimental cmavo coinages, so I don't know what any of them mean, and I don't know the tiki well enough to know where to look them up. But that is me.)
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