| In a message dated 8/24/2001 2:32:21 AM Central Daylight Time,
lojbab@lojban.org writes: (damn, I miss the real and useful {me}), How does it go exactly? I remember a thread a few weeks ago that went on for some time trying to find a way to say "mine" (the first fully functional concept of the average human infant -- I wonder if anyone has ever tested whether "I" is first understood at what can safely use what is mine). Eventually the thread came up with something that worked for the specific case, but was not generalizable. So, the "easy alternate way" is either hard, doesn't work or is not widely known. "x1 is subject to a nonessential defensible and defeasible claim to privileged association or use by x2" is what in Lojban? (History lesson for newbies. JCB invented (presumably stole from someone in the anonymous hordes) this notion (not so fully defined) and assigned it to {me}. Like most of his "inventions," he overused this one to the point where it was unclear just what it meant. At some point it was decided to give it a precise meaning again, keeping the grammar as a two-place brivla. The meaning hit upon was "x1 is one of the things referred to by x2," either because that was a pretty good approximation to its most common use at the time or because there was a felt need to do something to prevent people from translating "John is a man" as {la djan du lo ninmu}, which, while both grammatically and logically correct -- and thus better than the average first translations -- was very bad style and probably arrived at not by analysis but by simply copying the English word for word. Something was then found to take on the old job, but I don't know what that something is -- and am apparently not alone in this ignorance.) |