Re: [bpfk] Re: O HAI I FIXT UR LODGEBANZ

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 7:09 PM, John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
>
> Quantifiers are just arguments, whereas questions are jufra-level
> modifiers that change the overall illocutionary force.  They shouldn't
> be compared.

Quantifiers are not arguments! They are bridi level operators too.
Quantifiers quantify bridi, they say how many times a bridi is true.
The fact that syntactically they are part of a sumti is a Lojban
oddity (in predicate logic notation they don't do that). But then "ma"
and "ko" are also syntactic arguments even though as you say they have
an effect on the whole bridi. That's why I think "ko" should have been
something like "do .e'i" and "ma" should have been "ma pau", with "ma"
as a mere place holder. (That's actually the story I have come up with
for myself: In proto-Lojban, you always had to use "pau" to indicate a
question, and what we now call question words were just place holders,
but then the lazy lojbanists started leaving the "pau"s implicit, and
leaving it up to the listener to guess that they are being asked to
fill the empty slot. "ma pau" and "ma kau", and the same for all other
questions, were part of a wider system of which the "kau"s are the
only remnants.)

>> OK. That's how I have defined it in jbovlaste. I don't really think
>> that meaning particularly deserves a cmavo, but I don't need "jei" for
>> anything else, so I don't care.
>
> Well, what gets a NU is like what gets a BAI or a UI: fairly
> arbitrary.  \gua-spi has a very parsimonious ontology in which only
> sedu'u exists, but there are problems: "having a heart" and "having a
> kidney" are different ka's, but everything that has a heart in fact
> has kidneys, so \gua-spi can't distinguish.

But presumably for other reasons than only having "se du'u", since "lo
se du'u da se risna" and "lo se du'u da se debrango" are different, so
why couldn't you say "ro da go lo se du'u da se risna cu jetnu se
cusku gi lo se du'u da se debrango cu jetnu se cusku", or something
like that? You don't need "ka" to say that two different things are
always true or false together of anything.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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