[lojban] Re: jordis

[Martin Bays <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

* Tuesday, 2004-10-19 at 05:17 -0700 - jordi mas <jordimastrullenque@yahoo.com>:

> --- Martin Bays <jboste@zugzwang.port5.com> wrote:
> 
> > But {do me da poi broda} ("you are specific to someone who brodas") is
> > surely still less precise than {do du da poi broda} - which is logically
> > equivalent to (but a more flexible construction than) {do broda}.
> 
> coi martin.

(I prefer {maten.})

> Well, technically you're right. But try to see it from
> my viewpoint. If I'm too imprecise, at worst 
> people will ask for clarification (and most people
> won't say a thing just in case they look like
> ignorants). I can deal with that. However, if I use
> "du", then the "newbie alarm" goes off, and
> all will be yellings of "ludicrous", "estilistically
> inelegant" and so on, which I cannot answer;
> I'll rather be supposed to trust in the superior 
> aesthetical judgment of people with more intuitive 
> knowledge than me.

Lojban is about precision if it's about anything. If someone advises you to
use an imprecise construction when it would be just as easy to use a precise
one (which AFAICT no-one has as such done), explain calmly why you prefer the
latter. jbopre are reasonable folk in general!

> So my rule of thumb from now on is "never use du even
> when you want to assert identity, just in case". If I
> mean "hey, it's my wife you're talking about!" but I
> have to say "hey, you are talking about my wife" to
> avoid asserting identity, I'm fine with that, however
> imprecise it is.

Well that's a different case - the difference here is only one of emphasis.
The two sentences are logically equivalent, and it is a matter of English
idiom that the first emphasises the te tavla - so imho it would be malglico to
copy the construction to Lojban.

mu'o mi'e maten.