Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Bob LeChevalier, President and
Founder - LLG <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> Well, CAhA was certainly not intended to be the category "modal-logical
> operators", and BAI was originally intended to include all of the pure
> modals, since the insight from the JCB era was that linguistically the
> modals and case tags/sumti tcita could be used in grammatically
> interchangeable ways (we didn't think too much about semantic differences,
> only grammatical ones).  The intent at that point was that ni'i used as a
> modal would handle logical necessity, and its possible use as a sumti tag
> was consistent with this meaning.  BAI has evolved over the years, and is
> much more strongly associated with the place structures of the associated
> gismu per the fi'o equivalence, and this may have lost something from the
> intended modals that are among the set of BAI.

What were the other intended modals among the BAIs besides "ni'i"?

Consider these two sentences:

(1) ka'e ku no da klama lo tersla

(2) no da ka'e klama lo tersla

I would translate them as "it's possible nobody comes to the party"
and "nobody can come to the party" respectively. The first one is
clearly not about capability, and the second one may be about
capability but probably just circumstantial rather than innate.

If I understand your position correctly, you would understand them
both as the implausible "nobody is innately capable of coming to the
party". And in order to express my meanings with a modal you would
have to go with something like:

(1') na ku ni'i ku na ku no da klama lo tersla

(2') no da na ku ni'i ku na ku klama lo tersla

which can be simplified a bit by noting that "na ku no da" = "su'o da"
and "no da na ku" = "ro da", so:

(1'') na ku ni'i ku su'o da klama lo tersla

(2'') ro da ni'i ku na ku klama lo tersla

"it is not necessarily the case that someone comes to the party" and
"everyone is necessarily not coming to the party".

The problem of using "ni'i" for "necessarily" though is that it may
interfere with its other use for logical entailment. "te sau" is a
slightly better candidate, if it weren't for the x2 of "sarcu".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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