| In a message dated 4/19/2001 3:05:12 PM Central Daylight Time,
a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com writes: Which few clever things were lost? The best was the one that took all primary adjectives as fundamentally comparatives. Thus, for example, {blanu} (one of the rare words that survived in shape) meant "x1 is bluer than x2." That made it easier to explain why a blue house (bluer than a typical house) was so much less blue than a blue bluebell (bluer than a typical bluebell). It also led to endless arguments to the effect that, if we left the second place out, it was filled by a bound variable and thus everything was blue, since bluer than something. The response was -- within Loglan -- to say that that was not how to fill that space but rather with the contextually appropriate form, but that turned out to be too difficult for Loglanists to figure out. So, when we got to Lojban, that whole pattern (which was based on very good research, by the way, into what happens in ordinary languages) was dropped. There was some talk about replacing the comparison with a "to observer" or "by standard" which could then be filled in appropriately in much the same way as the comparisons would ("in comparison to a typical house" would make a good standard), but that was too hard, too -- and I suppose soemone could claim that there is *some* standard by which a screaming red house is blue. So, we got just the flat positive forms. There weren't a lot of others and I can't remember any good ones just now. If they come to me, I'll drop them into the pipe. |