Aside from this point, I am having trouble with this thread. Its title refers to syntactic constructions of some sort, which do not appear to apply to Lojban. So, I assume that it actually refers to some semantic functions that the constructions are used to perform. This is, taken translinguistically, an enormous list, so presumably the focus is on some (unspecified?) subset of these, apparently usually the abstract sumti. There are lots of interested un- or only partially- answered questions about these, but none of these has appeared so far.
What this seems to have settled down to is a very different sort of thing (which happens a lot with subject titles in Lojbanery), a Freshmanic attempt at profundity, starting, as usual, with a confusion of several very distinct
notions, in this case, questioning, question, and quest. Skipping over the argle-bargle, a question is primarily a linguistic form whose function, when normally used, is to elicit an item of information, the (correct) answer. Questioning is an activity of formulating, at least, but usually also asking, question either to people or about some topic.Answers, when they come, are then to be used to formulate a position. A quest is a process of self-fulfillment as understood by the quester (it may be finding a thing or a certain state of mind or whatever). So we are now talking about a quest, whose goal is to know the meaning of life, in some sense: my purpose in the world, the reason why things are the way they are, or countless other (none mentioned so far). Questing typically involves a number of emotions, though none is particularly relevant to it and the same goes for questioning. In short, what has any of this to do
with Lojban (which is presumably designed to avoid this sort of thing altogether, though can never succeed with human speakers)?
From: Ross Ogilvie <oges007@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, July 28, 2011 6:34:26 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Gerunds, infinitives and other technicalities
There is a member of NU that already does what you suggest below, namely su'u
mu'o mi'e ros
On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 7:16 PM, tijlan
<jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
ta'o
What exactly is an "event"? Are "asking the question" and "finding not
the answer" an "event"? Different jbopre might come up with different
NU:
lo nu preti
lo pu'u preti
lo du'u preti
lo ka preti
...
I would like to think of "nu" as a generic bridi subordinator, rather
than a so-called "abstractor" that extracts specifically the so-called
"event" element of something represented by a bridi. lo danfu, lo se
facki, lo se jinvi, lo se ckaji, etc., conventionally represented by a
non-"nu", could be as much of a nu.
being / to be a good parent
lo ka ce'u xamgu rirni
--> lo nu ce'u xamgu rirni
that you are a good parent
lo du'u do xamgu rirni
--> lo nu do xamgu rirni
Gerunds and infinitives, which may be said to be natlang ways of
creating a sumti out of a bridi subordination simultaneously, often
neither specify nor give a clue about the type of its "abstraction".
Also, such types in Lojban seem mostly inferable from the meaning /
definition of the selbri or other contexts. If you said "ko'a ckaji lo
nu ce'u xamgu rirni", using "nu" as a generic bridi subordinator
instead of "ka", I would still understand what the x2 is about,
insofar as I would know the relationship "ckaji" represents between x1
and x2.
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