Brainstorm! (two years too late)

[Nick NICHOLAS <nsn@VIS.MU.OZ.AU>]

So it's like this. You want to append a relative clause to a conjunction of
sumti. Like, you're talking about Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh who are
actors. If you say la .ebu.ty. .e. la ky.by. noi xe draci, you mean E.T.,
and [K.B who is an actor]. You want to say both are actors.

Until now, the only real option has been to say lu'a la .ebu.ty. .e. la ky.by.
lu'u noi xe draci. But you need a lu'a before you get started. You can't
change the scope of the following rel.clause, from the sumti it immediately
hooks on to, to the conjunction of sumti, as an *afterthought*. You can't
say the equivalent of "E.T. and K.B..... oh, yeah, who are both of them
actors", because that "who" is bound to Branagh perforce, once you neglected
to start the phrase with lu'a. In Lojban, you're currently forced to say
the whole phrase from the start --- which doesn't match what you can usually
do in such cases in the language.

And then it occured to me tonight, as I was perusing a syntactically very
complicated piece I wrote for the Uni Trek newsletter I edit: the solution
is obvious. It's what Lojban *always* does to resolve similar syntactic
ambiguities. It's surprising, in fact, that Lojban grammar has never
incorporated this feature, and it could be slipped in even now, at the
last minute, with no disruption to existing text, and no ruination to
the textbooks. (However are they coming along? ;)

That's right. An elidable terminator for .e.-joined sumti.

Let's call it XOI. (It could be a CVhV no problem; won't be used all that
often.) It would change the existing sumti scheme as follows:

sumti = sumti-1 [(joik # | ek #) sumti-1 /XOI/] ...

sumti-1 = sumti-2 [ek [stag] BO # sumti-1 /XOI/]

You could then say:

la .ebu.ty. .e. la ky.by. noi xe draci: ET and (KB who is an actor)

la .ebu.ty. .e. la ky.by. xoi noi xe draci: (ET and KB) who are actors

la .ebu.ty. .e. la ky.by. xoi noi xe draci ku'o .e. la margrit.tatcer. xoi
noi brito: ((ET and KB) who are actors, and MT) who are British.

This will, of course, be obscured in the BNF, but what I have in mind is
a left-nesting construct, as always happens in Lojban.

This could, I suppose, be extended to GA as well, though I doubt it need
be extended to other conjunct constructions.

What do you think, John? This worth slipping in? And can it be slipped in?

--

Nick.