Re: years as dates

[mark@xxx.xxx]

>Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 15:46:25 +0300
>From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
>Organization: Bilkent University
>
>From: Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>
>
>la xorxes. cusku di'e
>
>>
>> la robin cusku di´e

Jorge, can you convince your system to use ASCII apostrophes and not
spacing acute accents? I suppose it's not a big deal; I can display them
right when I try.

>> >lenu la kolumbus. facki le cnino gugde se detri li pavosore
>>
>> [cu missing]
>>
>
>Actually the original example in the lesson has a {kei} after {gugde}, which
>I assume does the same trick. It was
>
>lenu la kolumbus. facki lo cnino gugde kei se detri ma

Not good enough. Without the {kei} you had {cnino gugde se detri}
collapsing into a tanru; with the {kei} you have {nu... kei detri} as a
tanru. Remember, {nu ... kei} is grammatically a selbri, and as such can
participate in tanru formation. A {cu} before the {detri} would fix that,
since {cu} can't happen inside a tanru.

>> >{ta'o} I left {le cnino gugde} deliberately vague to avoid
>> >confusion/argument about what he really did discover!
>>
>> {le cnino munje} would work too.
>>
>
>That was my first choice, but I thought it might be a bit malglico.
>Coloumbus doscovered what was (to him at least) a new country, but "The New
>World" for the Americas seems a bit culture-specific.

Likely is. You could also try {le cnino .iadai gugde}, using empathetic UI
(i.e. there's belief, ascribed to someone else, not the
speaker... hopefully the reader will understand it's Columbus) or {la cnino
munje} and rely on the reader's knowledge of the idiom, taking it as a
name. Or even {le cnino sei la kolumbus. krici se'u gugde} to make the
empathetic sense more specified. (That's how I tend to think of {sei}: it
lets you make a bridi (with some structure restrictions) into a UI).

>This confirms what I had thought. I had considered introducing {xo} in this
>lesson but dropped the idea, as {xo} doesn't seem to be that useful outside
>complicated mekso stuff.

Sure it is. How many books do you have? {do ponse xu cukta}

>The convention is Sunday, which I personally find awkward, as I always think
>of Monday as the first day of the week.

As a Hebrew-speaker, I find Sunday=1 easier. Maybe we should set it to
Wednesday or Tuesday and be equally obnoxious to everyone.

~mark