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[lojban] Re: About jboselkei reviews
John E Clifford wrote:
While I am not sure I agree with the arguments in
toto, I agree with at least a weak form of the
conclusion. There is no need for a modal version
of {kakne}.
Ah, but ka'e isn't a modal version of kakne. At least it wasn't
intended to be.
The 4 modals of CAhA were things that you and I came up with together,
as being a way to resolve the potential inanity of "potential"
predicates. Remembering that in theory an unmarked bridi could refer to
something that is only potentially true (I remember examples relating to
ducks being potential swimmers, and paper being potentially flammable,
in the timeless potential sense, even when the duck is nowhere near
water and the paper is drenched.)
With potential a valid form of unmarked bridi, we needed a way to
explicitly mark bridi as to potentiality and actuality. You identified
4 possibilities, to which I mnemomically assigned ca'a, ka'e, nu'o, and
pu'i. Any resemblance of those modalities to the bridi from which their
cmavo were mnemonicized is not necessarily significant. If the
keyphrase "innately capable of" is misleading people, please remember
that, as with all keyphrase cmavo definitions, the purpose of that
keyphrase was to have something unique but as short as possible to be
typed in LogFlash. Just as with the keywords of the gismu, NONE of the
keyphrases were EVER intended to serve as the primary definitions of the
words (but then, we also expected that there would be a dictionary with
proper definitions within a year or so, and that never happened). They
were, however, baselined along with the cmavo list, and the lack of a
real dictionary has led people to think of them as something other than
what they are supposed to be.
I'm hoping that one eventual outcome of the byfy work is that the
keyphrases either disappear completely, or that they are returned to
their intended mnemonic-of-meaning function, and cease to be definitional.
> There further should be a modal version of {cumki}. It would be nice
to convince
some higher power to shift {ka'e} in that way
(appearance notwithstanding).
How would this cumki modal fit into the CAhA scheme you originally
proposed, or is it really that the keyphrase for ka'e is poorly chosen
and the pure potential modal should be closer to cumki in meaning than
to kakne?
lojbab
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