On Jan 23, 8:59 am, ".arpis." <rpglover64+jbo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 11:44 PM, D <
datapac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Jan 22, 2:31 pm, ".arpis." <
rpglover64+jbo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Evidentials do not take arguments.
> >
> > True; but at least some vocatives do.
>
> Vocatives take only the person to whom you're speaking as an argument.
could gloss over that detail, but I suppose I should have known
better.
> > > {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,
I believe that I do.
This seems an approach worth examining; though it may take me a bit of
time for me to be able to fully wrap my head around this grammatical
construction enough to use it well. For example, the whole idea is to
associate a numerical value with the sumti being tagged, so I'd want
something closer to {mi pe bai xa do klama}, with whatever closer is
necessary to separate the {xa} and the {do}.
> > 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;
And that's exactly the sort of detail I expected that I was unaware
of.
> perhaps try {bi'ai}, although you should have some more motivation behind
> its morphology than that no-one is using it.
Hm... {bei'e} comes reasonably close to containing most of the sounds
of "Bayes", and doesn't seem to be in use by any other experimental
cmavo.
> 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}.
At least for purposes of the fiction, I'm willing to entertain the
notion of a new word-category which simply has a grammar somewhat
parallel to vocatives, without explicitly being a member of that
class. Of course, the closer I can come to fitting this new
construction into true Lojban grammar, the better.
(Still, I can see how such a construction could occasionally be
useful, eg "Hi, probably-John", though I can also see how it could
also potentially end up playing merry hob with how such name-
assignments are carried through further speech.)