[lojban] Re: Dereferencing sumti referring to selbri

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> wrote:
> Now, {la'e zo cizra} refers to the
> meaning of the word {cizra}, which gets us halfway, and {me} converts
> the sumti into a grammatical selbri, so it would seem to take us the
> rest of the way.

Yes.

> However, {me} only creates a kind of weak identity
> predicate: {srana be la'e zo cizra} or {dunli be la'e zo cizra}.

That's the ancient meaning of {me}, unfortunately still preserved
in the ma'oste (and thus in jbovlaste). But even by CLL time the
more useful "x1 is a referent of <sumti>" meaning was already
established. See: <http://jbotcan.org/cllc/c5/s10.html>.
(It wouldn't be a bad idea to update jbovlaste.)

For "x1 is <sumti>'s by relationship x2" I use "me <sumti> moi".

> What you can't do with a stage-1 fu'ivla, however, is import transient
> verbs or other multi-argument predicates into Lojban.

Notice though that it is grammatical to add as many sumti to a selbri
as you want, so there is no problem in importing a multi-argument
predicate with {me} and using it with more than one argument. You
just have to figure out what the "obvious" role for the argument is in
each case.

> If you add {me'ei} to your toolbox, you can do this sort of thing
> without resorting to the extra-linguistic hyphen device:
>
>    .i mi na'e me'ei zo'oi fluent la .lojban.
>
> Does anyone think adding something like {me'ei} would be a good idea?

I might buy "me'ei fluent", but "me'ei zo'oi fluent" doesn't seem
like such a big improvement over "me la'e zo'oi fluent", or even
"me la'oi fluent".

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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