On 30 November 2010 19:17, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:In Japanese, "-nai" is a suffix for the negative form of a predicate
> "uipei" is not the best choice to examine "pei", just because "ui" is
> mainly purely expressive, and asking someone to provide a purely
> expressive locution is slightly silly. (But still meaningful.) But
> don't go and conlude from that that "UIpei" in general is silly.
> "UIpei" does not mean, as you seem to think, that the speaker says UI
> and then, independently, asks the listener to provide some kind of
> comment on that. "pei" modifies the meaning of the preceding word, in
> such a way that "UIpei" is a question. "Uipei" has a perfectly
> compositional meaning, but it is not the meaning of UI and then
> separately the meaning of "pei". (The same can be said of "UInai" for
> example. When you say "UInai" you are not expressing something with
> UI, and then somehow reversing what you just expressed. You are
> expressing something with "UInai".) UIpei asks the listener to answer
> with "UI" or "UInai". It's really quite simple, and it seems to me you
> are just trying hard to not understand.
>
>
> [ But of course ‘uinai’ is a simple blend of ‘ui’ and ‘nai’: “Whee – not!”,
> totally natural (well, only lately) English, as is “Whee – sorta” and the like.
(verb or adjective):
ki-ru (dasni ja'a)
ki-nai (dasni na)
ureshi-i (gleki ja'a)
ureshi-ku-nai (gleki na)
Furthermore, Japanese "oi", like British English "oi", happens to be
an exact equivalent of Lojban "oi", and the following _expression_ is
not impossible in an everyday Japanese situation:
oi-ja-nai (oi zei na)
This can possibly be used as a negating counter-complaint against
someone who complained with "oi" (meaning that this someone was wrong
in uttering "oi"). We can draw many analogies like this between Lojban
and natlangs.
However, xorxes' point is that the meaning of "uipei", like that of
"uinai", is compositional, and I don't think that's the case with
English "Whee - not!" or Japanese "ki-nai", "oi-ja-nai", etc.
You say "uinai" is natural with respect to "Whee - not!", but it's
very unlikely that we would find "Whee - not!" as an index in any
conventional dictionary, while it's very likely that we would find
"uinai" as such an index (jbovlaste does actually list "uinai" for
"unhappiness").
The meaning of English "where" can be considered compositional, made
> What is a case where this sort of thing is not true? So, ‘uipei’ comes out to
> mean “Whee – but how much?” or something like that, possibly meaningfull but
> basically dumb -- nothing like the use you claim for it.
out of "wh-" (question) and "-ere" (place), which may be similar to
"bu'au pei" that was hypothetically suggested by xorxes. Asking
"Where?", then, would according to you come out to mean "Place - but
what?". This reading sounds dumb, but this isn't how the word comes
out to experienced English speakers, is it? The listener is supposed
to reply such that the "-ere" part of "where" gets specified: "here",
"there", "at my house", etc. In my opinion, "pei" is similar to "wh-",
except that it asks for an attitudinal _expression_ rather than a
predicate-oriented _expression_.
If I were to invent an English compositional word for "uipei", I might
suggest something like "whappy" from "wh-" and "happy".
A: You bought me a cake!
B: Whappy?
A: Yippee!!
In this example, A isn't supposed to answer with a propositional claim
like "I am happy.", because the question is not concerned with the
format of proposition. It therefore contrasts with the following,
which is proposition-oriented:
A: You bought me a cake!
B: Are you happy?
A: I am, very much.
"Yippee!!" and "I am very much happy." are different manners of
_expression_. But they can express the same thing.
"broda jenai brode" is an _expression_ not so much of "broda true;
>> we seem to be content to allow them, so let them ride (but they are another
>>mark
>> against the "logical language" claim, even in the official restricted
> version).
>
> Logic doesn't really enter into it, but "pei" is certainly nice and regular.
>
> [Well, no. ‘nai’, say, takes a first person _expression_ and then modifies it in
> this case rejecting it “Whee – not”, as we say, and similarly for “Whee – sorta”
>
> and so on.
brode, true - not" as of "broda but not brode" based on the
compositional meaning of "jenai". When I see "jenai", it doesn't
partitively say to me "both the first and second elements are true -
the second is not true"; it says "the first is true but the second is
not", and that's because the meaning of "jenai" is readily
compositional at the moment of the utterance.
"uipei" is to be taken as semantically one thing at the moment of its
> But ‘pei’ does not start out with a first person _expression_ and add
> something to it. It somehow changes the first person _expression_ into a second
> person and then asks about it. There is a perfectly legitimate (is so far as
> ‘pei’ is legitimate at all) use that looks like this: Speaker says ‘ui’,‘pei’say
>
> the hearer. No person shifting and a reasonable sort of thing to ask.]
utterance, and, in such an occasion of "pei", the utterer does not
intend a first-person _expression_ to begin with. "pei" does not mark
such an intention of "this is my personal [UI]; now express your
[UI]"; it marks "express your [UI]".