| In a message dated 8/28/2001 4:54:47 PM Central Daylight Time,
rob@twcny.rr.com writes: Whoa! How did we end up here? And made them up by careful misreading and his own aberrant version of Lojban (at a rough guess). <3a and 3b both turn {le ka ce'u klama} into {le ka ce'u klama ce'u ce'u ce'u ce'u}, completely obliterating the meaning and actually _forcing_ you to elidethe first {ce'u} in order to actually say {le ka ce'u klama}. If I understand that right.> That was the point of the exercise, remember: to reduce the number of {ce'u} and {zo'e} that actually needed to be expressed, keeping as much of what already existed as possible but allowing fairly efficient movement toward more complex forms, should the need arise. Check the original; itdoes that fairly well. I admit that the short form 5-{ce'u} is a little tooshort, but it is the only one that works within the limits set (and it has its uses, though there are other ways of doing it, as has been noted). <2. In ka abstractions *without any ce'u*, the first empty place fills with ce'u and the rest fill with zo'e. Where context indisputably demands an n-adic relation where the value of n is certain, the first n empty places fill with ce'u and the rest with zo'e.> Simple, but unreliable ("where context indisputably demands" is going to take in a lot of cases for some folk, none for others). So use the rule that covers all the cases -- I've offered two that don't use up {si'o} or anything else and rarely require more than three or four syllables, regardless how many {ce'u} are needed. And agree with the first clause of yours (as it must to meet the problems conditions). Now, what is wrong with these proposals, especially the second? |