[lojban-beginners] Re: How versatile is "nu"?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 9:52 AM, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Officially, the most generic/nonspecific of NU is "su'u"; but people
> seem to use "nu" more often for the purpose of general abstraction.

The first thing I find odd about NU's is that they are called
"abstractors" instead of something more acurate like "subordinators".
What NU does is take a bridi and convert it into a selbri, so that it
will not be used as the main proposition but as a subordinate one.
It's true that properties and propositions are abstract objects (as
are numbers), but for me there is nothing abstract about events.
Something that can be seen cannot be very abstract.

As for "su'u" as general subordinator, it was never used that way,
whatever its definition says. We can only speculate as to the reasons.
One reason could be that Loglan had the equivalents of nu/ka/ni but
nothing like "su'u", and people just went on with that. Also, "nu" and
"ka" being just one syllable, and with such distinct functions, there
wasn't much incentive to merge them. CLL lists "su'u" among the "minor
abstraction types", which already suggests it was never thought of as
the "general abstractor".

> Personally, I wouldn't find it particularly odd if someone use "nu"
> for a terbri which the gimste defines as "du'u" or other specific
> types of abstraction. For example:
>
>  mi jinvi lo du'u broda (I think that the proposition "broda" is true)
>  mi jinvi lo nu broda (I think that the event "broda" is true)
>
> "jinvi"s x2 is officially to take "du'u". Is "nu" for such objects of
> mental activity / logical operation discouraged? If so, why?

I suppose it's mainly tradition. One subordinator would probably be
all that is needed, but the nu/ka/du'u split is very entrenched. "ka"
is used for incomplete propositions, where you need to keep one (and
in a couple of cases more than one) argument slot open. "du'u" is used
mainly with propositional attitude predicates. It's a relatively short
list, maybe twenty or so gismu. In most other cases you can use "nu".

Notice that the choice between nu/ka/du'u is dictated by the outer
bridi, the one that contains this one as an argument, whereas the
choice between the four types of nu: za'i/pu'u/zu'o/mu'e is dictated
by the subordinate bridi itself.

mu'o mi'e xorxes