I agree with that summary. It is interesting how debates from 15 years ago have started recurring, but without any of the opprobrium that used to rain down on the discussants.
To repeat another point from 15 years ago, the le/lo distinction is pertinent to events, so it makes sense for nu-kei to be a selbri, but propositions are like numbers in that they are unique, so it might have made more sense to have a function that would convert a bridi direct ly into a sumti.
These what-if discussions are pretty futile now, tho, I recognize.
,, And.
On 30 Jul 2011 16:53, "Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:--On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 11:06 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
It seems to me that whenever a subordinate clause is needed, only one
> Well, I'm not quit...
type (of the three main ones) makes sense and the others don't just
give a slightly different meaning, the others give nonsense.
For example, the subordinate bridi that goes in x1 of frili must be a
nu. It makes no sense to say of a proposition or of a property that it
is frili. The subordinate bridi that goes in x2 of jinvi must be a
du'u, it makes no sense to jinvi an event or a property. The
subordinate bridi that goes in the x2 of mutce must be a ka, it makes
no sense to say that something is mutce in an event or a proposition.
As far as I can tell there are hardly any cases where we have a
choice, and then what's the point of duplicating the information that
is already there in the meaning of the predicate? And in the cases
where we hesitate which one is "right" (usually between nu and du'u),
it's only because the predicate is not well defined, not because there
are two separate meanings that the same predicate would distinguish.
That's as far as the "big three" are concerned: du'u, nu and ka. In
the case of the four types of nu (pu'u, za'i, zu'o and mu'e) the
determination comes from the inner bridi rather than from the slot
where the bridi is inserted, but again there is little or no choice,
the event described by the bridi practically determines the subtype of
nu, so there is no point in duplicating that information with
different NUs.
ni and jei are special cases because they do encode additional
information, although they have the problem that they are badly
defined, so that each of them has two separate usages. Their main
usage is in encoding an indirect question. jei can be just avoided and
replaced by "du'u xu kau". ni (in the indirect question sense) is
usually something like "ka se la'u ma kau".
I can't say much about li'i and su'u because I don't really understand
them, but they are hardly used anyway.
In summary, I tend to agree that a single subordinator would have made
things simpler without really losing anything important.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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