RE: [jboske] sane kau? (was: RE: Re: RE: Re: lo'edu'u

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Bloody hell! A terrifying number of messages in the last 24 hours
demanding to be read carefully. 

Jordan:
> poi'i gives you the identity abstractor, 

I haven't yet worked out what that means. Hopefully when I've properly
digested all the recent messages it'll dawn on me.

> and it is one of the few of And's (extreemly numerous) experimentals 
> which could maybe be useful. 

To me, they are 'virtually useful' for my 'virtual Lojban usage'! A
lot of the proposals are attempts to address problems I have encountered
even in my scant usage over the years. 

> I don't like that it reuses ke'a though 

Your modified SE+ka proposal is attractive & entails the use of ce'u 
rather than ke'a of course.

The main attraction of ke'a rather than ce'u is among those given
on the poi'i wiki page: it allows a simple way to 'reflexives',
since multiple ke'a corefer while multiple ce'u cannot corefer.

> Anyway, I don't see what's wrong with the definition of kau as it
> is though. I think basically it is kau==paunai. And I don't think
> it is neccesary or really desirable to formalize it more than that

It depends on the extent to which we want a compositional semantics
-- the extent there are regular rules that take the meaning of each
word and each construction and derive a logical formula from them.

I am in favour of a compositional semantics, but not necessarily in
favour of trying to invent one where the lexicosyntactic form was
not created compositional. So for example, I don't think a
compositional story can be told about kau or makau, but for that
reason I prefer du'au, because it is compositional.

> (I don't see people trying to formalize the meaning of "ko", for
> example---some things are going to have to be enough with just a
> simple, informal definition, if you want to actually *use* the
> language) 

"ko" seems fairly unproblematic, though. Had it not been, I reckon
there would have been attempts to formalize it.

--And.