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[lojban] Denoting counterfactual sentences in Lojban?
Hi
all,
I'm
slowly continuing my spare-time effort to learn Lojban (begun about a month
ago). Having read "Lojban for Beginners" I'm now rereading it and doing
all the exercises. Once I'm done with this, I think I'm going to make
myself a Lojban language CD to listen to in the car (consisting of the examples
in "Lojban for Beginners", spoken in English and then Lojban -- and probably
mispronounced and mumbled by me, as diction is not my strong
suit...).
Anyway, I've run into some doubts in Exercise 7 of
Chapter 5:
Hopefully someone on this list can clear things up for
me. I have one significant question -- how to represent hypothetical
sentences -- but I probably have made some other small mistakes too which you
may correct if you wish.
First,
consider Exercise 7, part 2:
"Susan
assumes that Zhang knows that Susan is late."
The translation given in the answer
key
is:
.i la
suzyn. sruma lenu la jan. djuno lenu lerci fa lenu la suzyn.
klama
Now,
this is OK but personally I find it a bit annoying. I found myself wanting
to do instead something like
.i
lenu la suzyn. klama cu lerci ("The event of Susan
coming is late")
.i la
jan jimpe go'i ("Zhang knows the previous.")
.i la
suzyn. sruma lenu go'i ("Susan assumes the
previous.")
or
else replacing the last of the three sentences with
.i ra
srumo lenu go'i (using "ra" to refer to "Susan", pretty obviously in
context)
However, I don't yet know how to mark the second
utterance in this chain as hypothetical, so that the listener knows I don't
really believe Zhang knows the previous, I'm just saying that Susan assumes
so. IN other words, I want to say
.i la jan HYP jimpe go'i ("Zhang knows the
previous.")
where HYP should be substituted by some appropriate
cmavo that I haven't noticed in the "Lojban for Beginners" book
yet....
Is there a cmavo like this? What is it? If
not, what's the equivalent mechanism?
For a simpler example of the same issue,
consider
"Ben does not believe Lojban is
English"
which should be (?)
.i la lojban HYP mintu la
glibau
.i la ben na sruma go'i
[the first sentence here leads to another confusion
which is that lojban is a cmene, but I don't know a cmene for English -- glibau
is a lujvo not a cmene...
I don't like
.i la lojban HYP mintu le
glibau
because this is a posited equivalence between two
entities of different types, it seems semantically incorrect even though it may
(?) be syntactically allowable.
Comments, answers, etc.?
-- Ben Goertzel
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