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RE: [lojban] questions about DOI & cmene

At 04:45 AM 07/15/2001 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

Lojbab:
> >2. "la nanmu" means "ko'a poi cmene fa zo nanmu ke'a", while
> >"coi nanmu" means "coi do [p]oi nanmu fa ke'a".
>
> No.  coi nanmu means coi do poi du la nanmu just as coi djan means coi do
> poi du la djan

No -- what you say is in clear contradiction to the Woldy Codex, page 136
in discussion of ex. 11.5, though I too was in error. It is clear from
the book that "coi nanmu" = "coi le nanmu" = "coi do voi nanmu fa ke'a".


Well, I could say the book is wrong, but that wouldn't be appropriate. %^)
I'll just say that in ex. 11.5 there doesn't seem to be a substantial difference in meaning between his chosen expansion and mine, which would have use "la" instead of "le". 


> >  I cannot work
> >out from the Woldy Codex whether "doi nanmu" is in this
> >respect like LA or like COI: does it mean "O man" -- "doi
> >do [p]oi nanmu fa ke'a" -- or "O Man" -- "doi la nanmu"?
>
> It should be like coi.  Grammatically COI and DOI are essentially the same
> thing, with the differences intended for phonological restriction reasons.

OK. So if somebody's name is "Nanmu", then the vocative would have to be
"doi la nanmu" = "doi do poi cmene ke'a fa zo nanmu".


That would certainly work.


> >3. "do poi nanmu fa ke'a" should mean "those of you that
> >are men", but does "coi nanmu" mean "Hello, those of you
> >that are men",
> >  "coi do poi nanmu fa ke'a", or does it
> >mean "Hello, men", "coi do noi nanmu fa ke'a"?
>
> No - those of you that I am calling men.

OK, but not "those of you that I am calling _Nanmu/Man_".


I'm missing the difference in the above pair.


Your gloss "those of you that I am [describing as] men" indicates
that "coi nanmu" expresses a nonveridical restrictive modification
of "do". It follows that to express a veridical modification of
"do" one would have to say:

  coi do poi nanmu fa ke'a
  coi do noi nanmu fa ke'a


Yes, since neither coi nor do are intended to be veridical descriptions.


there being no briefer substitutes for these.


Maybe
coi lo nanmu


This leaves a serious problem, which I'm utterly amazed I've
never noticed before:

+restrictive/-incidental   +veridical: do poi nanmu fa ke'a
-restrictive/+incidental   +veridical: do noi nanmu fa ke'a
+?restrictive/-?incidental -veridical: do voi nanmu fa ke'a
-?restrictive/+?incidental -veridical: do ??? nanmu fa ke'a

-- how do we make the restrictive/incidental contrast with
nonveridical descriptions?
You may find a place in the book where all those parameters are applied to voi, but I think all it means is "-veridical" with no specification on the other parameters. 

> Umm, what do you mean by "encouraged"?  Most Lojbanists seem to want to

> have something to put after mi'e at the ends of their postings etc. and it
> has always been one of the first things a new Lojbanist TRIES to do.  No
> encouragement needed.

What I mean is that someone called Sally gets called "la salis." rather
than "la sali.". Why? Why not "la sali."?
Because "sali" is neither a cmene ending in a consonant nor a brivla, and therefore it is ungrammatical. Indeed sali breaks into two words, so the listener might take that string as "la sa li".
If you are suggesting that we could have permitted anything to be a name, so long as it ended in a pause, so that "la" opens it and the pause closes it, then you eliminate the possibility of a bare (unmarked) vocative like "djan.". "mi klama le zarci" would have to be interpreted as a vocative call to someone named "miklamalezarci".
Of course the real reason is that we never considered the possibility of names other than in JCB's canonical consonant-ending form, and then added the descriptive name as an afterthought because it offered no conflict and served a function useful in natlangs. 


OK, in some cases you'd have
to have a la after coi, e.g. if Britney were "la britni" then it'd
have to be "coi la britni" rather than "coi britni", since "coi
britni" means "hello you who are restrictively and nonveridically
described as whatever the fuhivla _britni_ denotes". But this seems like
a choice Britney and her namers should make after due deliberation; the
occasional extra "la" might seem a small price to pay to avoid mangling
the sound of her name, by, say, perverting it into "britnis.".
That might be permissible, but the typical starting Lojbanist wanting to make a name for themselves (pun intended) doesn't know whether the Lojbanization of their birthname is a valid brivla, much less what it means.
Now my daughter's middle name is Katrina, and it was offered to her (she chose it from a list not knowing its Lojban sense) deliberately in recognition of the ability to then call her "la ka trina" which teenage boys certainly seem to feel is an apt name. 

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org