On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 11:44 PM, D
<datapacrat@gmail.com> wrote:
True; but at least some vocatives do.
Vocatives take only the person to whom you're speaking as an argument.
> {fi'o te kanpe xokau} (replace xokau with some number) uses an experimental
> gismu, but conveys, in otherwise standard lojban, a linear certainty, and
> is intended to be used with indefinite numbers.
>
> {de'o} appears to be the mekso operator for log; I guess you could say
> {fi'o te kanpe li de'o ni'u xa}, or define an experimental cmavo in the BAI
> class to mean something similar.
Hm... As interesting as the construction you present is, it also seems
to lose the main advantage of indicators, which can be applied to
almost any individual part of a sentence, as well as the sentence as a
whole.
BAI appear (almost) anywhere in a sentence, although less than so than indicators; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to have emphasis appear depending on position: e.g.
{bai do mi klama} vs
{mi bai do klama} vs
{mi klama bai do}
Alternatively, if you wish to explicitly tag sumti with probabilities, you can use modal relative phrases (
http://dag.github.com/cll/9/10/). e.g.:
{mi pe bai do klama}
As far as I can tell, {bi'a} is not currently being used by Lojban,
and isn't even anywhere in lojban.org's list of currently or formerly
proposed/experimental cmavo. Would a definition such as the following
be incompatible with baseline Lojban? That is, would this way of
arranging such a cmavo allow for more than one reading, or conflict
with some other aspect of Lojbanic principles?
I think it's convention to have non-standard cmavo avoid CVV word shape; perhaps try {bi'ai}, although you should have some more motivation behind its morphology than that no-one is using it.
Again, if {bi'a} is a vocative, then it inherits all of the vocative grammar and some of their semantics. In particular, {bi'a doi .djan.} becomes grammatical, with the {doi} attaching to {bi'a}.
bi'a [number] [do'u]
This phrase as a whole is grammatically treated as a single evidential
indicator. The number is the decibels of Bayesian probability the
speaker assigns to the word or phrase the evidential refers to; zero,
or a lack of a number, indicates 0 decibels (meaning 50% probability).
{do'u} is mandatory if the next word is another number, in order to
prevent confusion; otherwise it is optional.