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Re: [lojban-beginners] Possession with "le le ..."



Ah! ok.  Thank you Luke, let me try again:

The technical reason is that CU separates the preceding sumti from
the selbri that follows, and a nested LE is part of the sumti. 

If a cu were permitted in the case described, I believe this would
be valid:

  le le broda cu brode cu brodi

And would be identical to:

  le le broda ku brode cu brodi

I suspect this is not permitted for the following reasons, though
I'm speculating:

 * CU is designed as an aide to the listener in finding the selbri,
   so permitting it in a nested LE opens the possibility of having
   multipe CU in a bridi, weakening the ability to find the selbri.
 * KU is the terminator to use when terminating a nested LE.  While
   you could *also* unambigiously permit other terminators, this
   isn't the only scenario where this is true.  If you permitted
   every terminator that wasn't unambiguous you'd still have a
   parseable grammar, but one which would be more difficult to
   understand: there would be increased cognitive load in determining
   what is being terminated, as you no longer have a direct
   correspondence between the opening and closing selma'o.

-Alan

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:15:34AM -0400, Luke Bergen wrote:
>    I think the question though is, if {cu} means "separate selbri from
>    preceding sumti" then, why can't you do {le le ninmu cu klama} where this
>    is interpreted as: (something that goes in x1 of: ( something that goes in
>    x1 of: (ninmu <cu so break out of this sumti and start talking about a
>    selbri>) comes).
>    Ok, I don't know how to describe that better. Basically, if {cu} says "ok,
>    we're done with this sumti, now do a selbri" but that itself is happening
>    inside a LE, then why can't the following selbri be converted by the outer
>    LE?
> 
>    On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:06 AM, .alyn.post.
>    <[1]alyn.post@lodockikumazvati.org> wrote:
> 
>      On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 07:49:21AM -0700, Ben Foppa wrote:
>      > Lojban for Beginners says "...consider how you would say le tamne pe
>      > le ninmu klama 'the woman traveller's cousin' with this kind of
>      > nesting. You could flip it around as le le ninmu klama tamne � but
>      > then, how can you tell where the 'possessor' ends and where the
>      > 'possessee' begins?"
>      >
>      > I wonder why a construct like "le le ninmu klama cu tamne" wouldn't
>      > work, to separate the argument to the first "le" (which is "ninmu
>      > klama"), from the argument to the second "le" (which is "tamne"). Is
>      > the purpose of "cu" not simply to separate two selbri when they are
>      > consecutive arguments, or when one is the argument to another?
>      >
> 
>      You can use {ku} to terminate the inner {le}:
> 
>      le le ninmu klama ku tamne
> 
>      -alyn
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