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Re: [lojban] will you help me understand BAhE+BU?

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 03:40:01PM -0500, Kevin Reid wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2011, at 15:29, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> 
> >Well, {ge'e} being exactly that was my point there; {ba'e} is
> >*very* generic emphasis. As far as I can tell it's actually
> >pretty un-Lojbanic; it seems to mean "I'd verbally empasize this
> >if I was speaking English".
> >
> >je'u works; {.o'o cu'i} works, others.
> 
> 
> (This is my first comment on this topic.)
> 
> I first saw the relevant meaning of emphasis as "This is the part
> of my utterance which is actually interesting, as opposed to being
> required for context and grammar." Which neither of your
> suggestions really conveys.

I suppose.  e could certainly make one.

> I now note that this is almost-but-not-quite {bi'u} or possibly
> {jo'a}.
> 
> If I were making arbitrary changes, I would keep ba'e as a word,
> but move all of BAhE (ba'e and za'e) into UI3a next to {bi'u},
> thus simplifying the grammar. 

I'd rather not, as that actually makes past usage *wrong*.  The
point of holding ba'e and za'e unused for a long time is that it's
obvious what every document means as long as you have at least a
vague idea when it was written.

> What you lose is the ability to emphasize (not important) or mark
> as nonce (possibly very important) a member of UI, since you can't
> modify a UI with a UI (right?).

Grammatically, not really, but semantically I don't see why not.

-Robin

-- 
http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/

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