In a message dated 6/20/2001 9:40:10 PM Central Daylight Time,
rob@twcny.rr.com writes:
On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 09:03:44PM -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 6/20/2001 6:25:42 PM Central Daylight Time,
> rob@twcny.rr.com writes:
>
>
> > .i le da'i logji cmavo poi roroi mapti zoi <if, then> cu du lo da'i
logji
> > cmavo poi da'inai na zasti
> >
> Something ain't quite right here -- and in a previous post from the same
> source. I guess that -- whether discursive or "attitudinal" -- {da'i}
can go
> anywhere in a sentence, but it seems pretty clear that in at least some
> places here it is adjectival to {logji cmavo}, meaning either "supposed"
or
> "{da'i}-like"
Why would it be adjectival? If I were talking about the word {da'i} itself,
I
would have said something involving {zo da'i}. Here I was using it for its
newfound purpose of describing possible worlds.
What I was using it for was "the supposed logical connective which always
applies to <if, then>".
Without the {da'i}, I would be talking about "the logical connective which
always applies to <if, then>". However, no such connective exists, and that
sentence would logically fall apart because of that. So I used {da'i} to
refer to this object in a possible world where such a thing would exist (and
I pity the inhabitants of that world and the broken version of Lojban
they're
stuck with).
The point is well taken, as I said, but will this way of saying it really
work? Wherever {da'i} occurs, it presumably works to throw the whole
sentence into the suppositive mood (I'm using the official rules, of
course). Whether the repeated {da'i} throws it into a second-order
supposition or not, I can't say, nor can I work out the rhetorical effect of
putting the {da'i} after {le}. At a guess the latter focuses the goal of the
supposition on the sumti which {le} begins, which is, I think, your goal,
more or less.
So this seems to say "Suppose that there is a logical connective which always
matches 'if then' ..." or, more literally but clearly not what you want,
"Suppose that the logical connective which always matches 'if then' is a
logical connective that does not in fact exist" Now all of this does make
for a problem, since it involves a referring phrase which you want to say
does not refer. And yet it does refer (in fact, to {ganai...gi...}); what it
does not do is match "if..., then..."
Does {le a'o mi se prami} mean "the beloved I hope for"?
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