[lojban-beginners] Re: tanru order

["Michael Turniansky" <mturniansky@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/1/08, Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>>  [W]ithout the ka, "vajni mutce" means (to
>> me) an important muchness,  that is to say, that the extreme thing
>> itself is important, but not necessarily that it extreme in the
>> quailty of being important.
>
> Why would you take it to be extreme in some unmentioned property
> in preference to the one mentioned in the seltau?
>

  But that's just it.  It's NOT a "property" mentioned in the seltau.
It's just a gismu.  It could be a noun (an important
person/object/animal/concept, etc.), a verb (being important), an
adverb (importantly), or an adjective (important).  But it is NOT a
property (importantance), event (being important), quantity (amount of
importance), fact (an idea of importance) etc. without those camvo
that make it so (ka, nu, ni, du'u/si'o, respectively).

>> For example, I can easily see "mi vajni
>> mutce be lo ka bebna" --- I am an important superfool.
>
> Yes, when an explicit property is put in x2, then that one has priority,
> no doubt about it.

  (FWIW dept:  I meant to leave out the "be", but the meaning doesn't
actually change, just makes the X2 more able to be swapped out, as
it's no longer tightly bound to tertau, but to the tanru as a whole)

>
>> Things in the
>> seltau position tend to be interpreted adjectivally/adverbially, as
>> well they should be, since they are supposed to modify the tertau
>> (which would therefore be treated nounally, verbally, (or adverbially
>> if they followed by another brivla))
>
> What does "adjectivally/adverbially" mean in Lojbanic terms?

  Ummm... the same they mean in any language?  Modifying the noun,
modifying the verb/adjective/adverb

> I don't see how in {vajni mutce}, {vajni} fails to modify the tertau:
> it provides a good choice of property for its x2 place.
> Do you have the same objections for {vajni zmadu}, {vajni mleca},
> {vajni traji}?
>

  I do, indeed.  Let me just set out one paradoxic thing, though:  As
LUJVO, I would actually say that vaizma, vajme'a, etc. would be more
lobykai, but that's partly because lujvo have whatever relationship
between the rafsi the definer sets forth, and we have certain
traditional conventions with regards to some of them (essentially,
that which was imported from English: "more green" -> greenER, "most
green" -> "greenEST", changing prefixed words to suffixed morphemes,
which was carried through with Loglan.) .

>> Without the ka in the tanru, it
>> also requires mental massaging to get "vajni mutce" into "mutce be lo
>> ka vajni".
>
> Compared to what?

  There was no comparative term in my sentence.  You had earlier
asserted that you liked "vajni mutce" because it (and I'm paraphrasing
here) required no complexity to expand it to "mutce be lo ka vajni".
I'm asserting that in fact, it does (as you have to add a "ka" that's
not in there), you just chose to gloss over it.

> What is the explicit meaning of {mutce vajni}?
> (I mean explicit in Lojban terms, expanding the tanru.)

  The explicit meaning?  Hmm... possibly something along the lines of
"vajni je mutce be lo ka vajni"  But that proves nothing.  I would
probably  expand "barda gerku" along similar lines: "gerku je barda be
fi le'e gerku"  I ask you -- how would you expand "blanu tsani"?
Possibly "tsani je blanu"?  What about "tsani blanu"? "blanu [be]
tai{/pa'a} le'e tsani"?   (Notice, btw, that the expansion "blanu je
tsani" means exactly the same as "tsani je blanu", and yet still would
be an expansion of the former, not the latter, tanru, despite the
order of the gismu being switched).  It's an established rule that the
tanru as a whole may refer to things that are not really in either
category of the compononent gismu (although you would be at great risk
of loss of intelligibility), but that the seltau modifies the tertau.
Good luck expanding many of the tanru in section 14-15 of chapter 5.

  (BTW, I notice the refgram itself (which I know you are reflexively
iconoclastic towards, no matter what it says), in chapter 5, ex. 4.1
uses "mutce bo barda")



>
> If you only say {ti na mutce}, naturally I have no idea what you may
> mean, I will ask {mutce ma}. But if there is some clue in the context, for
> example if we have been discussing things with a given property, or
> if we use an informative seltau, I can figure out what the implicit x2 is.
>
  That's my point.  I submit that "ka vajni kei" would be an
"informative seltau", but that "vajni" alone would imply something
else.

           --gejyspa