On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Judson Lester
<nyarly@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm editing a flash card deck of lojban words for my own use, and one of the things that's struck me is how often gismu constrain the kinds of things in a position.
Most of the time the constraint makes sense (at least in a "sure, I can see it" kind of way) but as I find more gismu where a position is defined as being a person or an event (and all the ones that are {ka}) when the other way might make sense, I begin to wonder more and more why (or if?) the suggested kinds for a place aren't merely a guidance.
For example, I'm just looking at
jenca: x1 (event) shocks/stuns x2
People aren't shocking. Things people do, or in rare occasions some property of a person are shocking.
What would be the problem with "do jenca mi"? I suppose there's some elided abstraction that I could use in the x1 place to mean "some event related to you" - but why would that be neccesary?
Simply because the English "You shocked me!" actually means "What you just did shocked me!". This has to do with the issue "sumti raising", which has been bandied about countless times throughout the years.
Or do I misunderstand - is the point that jenca describes a shock related to an event, and *therefore* "do jenca" implies that you did something shocking on the face of it?
No, the point is that things don't shock, some abstraction, usually an event (although I can imagine how properties (ka) and even possibly ideas (si'o) could as well), which is /related/ to the thing, is what shocks.
(The same thing for stunning. /I/ don't stun you, my hand doesn't stun you, the boxing glove I'm wearing doesn't stun you. It's the event of me slamming my fist into your face that stuns you.)
If it's the latter, are the other abstraction requirements (and other implied types) likewise looser than I imagine?
The vast majority of abstraction places are looser than depicted in that it may be possible to use an abstraction in that place that isn't in the list (such as properties for lo jenca), but very few abstraction places can take a concrete object.