[lojban] Re: pacna is kind of broken.

[Robin Lee Powell <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 03:12:27PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> The definition of pacna is amazingly polysemous.
> 
[snip]
> 
> Even in the main definition we're conflating "desire" (which is
> djica) with expectation (the x3 place).

Now that I've bitched about this, let me talk about possible
solutions.

We can't change pacna away from "hope"; there's too much usage based
on that.  In fact, AFAICT pacna is so'a roi treated as a 2-place
predicate meaning "x1 hopes for x2".  In particular, the Martin
Luther King, Jr. speech translation uses "mi pacna da" a lot,
apparently.

As far as I can tell, only pacna, cunso and (arguably) lakne have
places for the likelyhood of an event.  So there's no where else to
turn for "I expect it to rain tomorrow" without implying desire for
the event.  I suspect a lujvo could be made with krici and cunso,
but it'd suck a lot.

cu'o is no help IMO, because it's not explicitely subjective. Having
one word for the probability senses of "I expect it to rain
tomorrow" and "John Doe will win the election, with a probability of
95% +/- 1% 19 times out of 20" would be *bad*.

Therefore, I reccomend the creation of a gismu for "expect", formed
in the traditional gismu fashion, for approval by the BPFK.  The
place structure would be exacly that of pacna, with explicit notes
that desire for the event is not in any way implied.

-Robin

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