Re: [lojban-beginners] Tanru-internal connectives, place structure, non-sense

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 9:21 AM, selpa'i <m3o@plasmatix.com> wrote:

On 11.11.2013 01:58, Michael Turniansky wrote:

Simple... the compound selbri "sutra je jipci" doesn't HAVE an x2
place (but it does have both an s2 and j2 place which have to be
internally linked with be), similar to the way that a lujvo may not
have all the places that the underlying veljvo seltau jonai tertau
have.

Okay, now I at least understand what you are saying. I find this problematic, as tanru are by their very nature ad-hoc, and figuring out such eliminated places on the fly is likely impossible (assuming for a second that it's sensible).

If you say it has no x2, then I assume you would say that in:

mi klama je sutra lo tricu

{lo tricu} actually fills klama3 and it fills neither klama2 nor sutra2. How can this be practically used? In which case it would mean:

No, I would not say that. When I said " 'sutra je jipci' doesn't have an x2," I wasn't generalizing to _all_ broda JA brode. If you SPECIFY something in that spot, as in your sentence, you ARE saying the same as "mi klama gi'e sutra vau lo tricu" and you darn well better be using something that can fit both of the underlying x2 places (Which obviously "lo tricu" cannot) . What I was asserting was that since the set of all things that are both se sutra and se jipci is an empty set (as far as I can reasonably ascertain), it /de facto/ has no x2 place, not that it has no x2 place by nature of the construction.

Therefore as long as your sentence doesn't try to put something into that place, there is no problem with asserting the sentence "mi sutra je jipci" is meaningful (I guess, to put it another way, I am asserting that an implicit "zo'e" (but probably not, pe'i, an explicit "zo'e") in fact doesn't have to be something that can really exist. (kind of like the way that mathematicians 400 years ago would all agree that the square root of a negative number is complete and utter rubbish, and any student who suggested otherwise should be beaten with a switch until he learned the proper ways of mathematics, but goshdarnit,. don't all these equations and proofs work out nicely if we PRETEND there could be such a thing?)

mi klama je sutra lo tricu
"I go [and-am-fast] from the tree."

Is this not weird?

I don't know why this is a such a problem for you.

Apart from the aforementioned practical problems your idea presents, I think it's also strange for places to disappear from a *tanru*. In my opinion, when you join two things with {je} (in this case the sumti places), then you claim that they both apply, not that the places disappear when nothing can satisfy the claim. It seems somewhat backwards.

mu'o mi'e la selpa'i

--gejyspa