Re: [lojban] on emotions again

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 25 November 2010 21:06, Remo Dentato <rdentato@gmail.com> wrote:
> If not at the beginning of the sentence, from a syntactic point of
> view, the emotion is "attached" to the preceding sumti.
>
> An example that was rised in IRC is:
>
> 1. {.a'i mi tavla fo la lojban}
> 2. {mi tavla .a'i fo la lojban}
> 3. {mi tavla fo la lojban .a'i}
>
> From a semantic point of view, this means that the the feeling "refers
> to" that sumti so the first one states that the speaker is doing an
> effort in speaking lojban, the second one suggests that the effort is
> due to talking (rather than, for example, writing) and the third
> suggests that the effort is related to the fact that the language is
> Lojban (as opposed to be English or Chinese, for example). In all
> three cases, the speaker is the one doing the effort.

Any bare UI (without a scope changer like {fu'e}) modifies the left
immediate element, for which there is no real dichotomy of "sentence
or sumti". {a'i} in {.a'i mi tavla fo la lojban} modifies the whole
sentence, not so much because it's "at the beginning of the sentence"
as it modifies (or is attached to) an implicit {i}, in my opinion:

_[i] .a'i mi tavla fo la lojban_ .i ... .i...

What if {ni'o} instead of {i}? Would the whole paragraph be modified:

_ni'o .a'i mi tavla fo la lojban .i ... .i ..._ ni'o ...

If so, and if we wanted to alter the scope from the paragraph to the
sentence, we would have to use {fu'e} rather than {i}, since {i} can't
follow {ni'o} (according to jbofi'e):

ni'o _fu'e .a'i mi tavla fo la lojban fu'o_ .i ... .i ...


In {mi tavla fo la lojban .a'i}, does {a'i} modify the cmevla {lojban}
or the entire sumti {la lojban}? In the traditional grammar, a cmevla
is not followed by {ku}, so there may not be any meaningful difference
between {la lojban .a'i} and {la .a'i lojban}. If brivla instead of
cmevla, however, the condition changes, and UI's position may become
significant. The distinction is useful when you have multiple
components within the sumti and want to be specific about the scope of
your emotion. For example:

a) mi tavla fo lo melbi _jbobau_ .a'i [ku]
b) mi tavla fo lo _melbi_ .a'i jbobau [ku]
c) mi tavla fo _lo .a'i melbi jbobau [ku]_

In contrast to (a), (b) says that the speaker is feeling a sense of
effort about the beauty of Lojban (perhaps the speaker is trying to
appreciate a quality which other jbopre claim to be beautiful). In
(c), the emotion is directed toward the gadri, toward that which put
the entire sumti together, meaning that the emotion is felt about the
conceptual whole denoted by {melbi jbobau}. My opinion is that this
form is equivalent to {lo melbi jbobau ku .a'i}.

For practicality, however, we seem to often use the form {LE sumti UI
[KU]} to mean {LE sumti KU UI} or {LE UI sumti [KU]}.

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