Re: [lojban] Re: Translating preposition

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Friday, March 23, 2012 00:09:22 Jacob Errington wrote:
> > No. "cmavo" has a fourth place for the language. I could say "zoi gy. and
> 
> .gy.
> 
> > mintu zoi .gy. or .gy. enai zoi .gy. if .gy. lo ka ce'u cmavo makau fo lo
> > glico".
> 
> Ah the elusive places that I forget. Very fair point.
> Then, it seems to me like a preposition is simply a [cmavo je tcita], where
> tcita2 can be various things like a verb, [selbri], a noun, [sumti], or an
> adjective, [selbri] too I guess. (Would [seltau] be more appropriate? I
> mean, the gloss for [tanru] is "phrase compound". Isn't "enraged blue
> dream" a "phrase compound" as well?)

I call adjectives "skivla". The adjective, as a part of speech, does not exist 
in Lojban. "tanru" means a binary compound, if you call "enraged blue dream" a 
tanru, you have to parse it as "enraged (blue dream)" or "(enraged blue) 
dream", where one of the components is itself a tanru.

> Using [cmavo] has the advantage of getting at cmavo2, the class. I figure
> that we can group non-lojban cmavo, i.e. prepositions/other structure
> words, too, into classes. I don't think however that many (at least for
> English) would have the cmavo2-ability of being interchangeable under all
> circumstances, maintaining syntactical coherence.

"and" and "or" are in the same selma'o, as are "either" and "both". Thus 
phrases like "both John or Bill run" are correct by context-free syntax, but 
fail the next level of grammar. The same sort of phrase exists in Lojban, such 
as "mi du ra'o do", "le gerku pe na ku", and "mi te u do".

Many words in English (and other natlangs) belong to more than one part of 
speech, at least one of which is a kind of cmavo. E.g. "for" is a preposition 
and a conjunction; "like" is a preposition and a verb; "or" is a conjunction, 
a verb, and a seltau, as well as a homonym of a heraldic adjective. I don't 
know how to assign such words to selma'o.

Pierre
-- 
I believe in Yellow when I'm in Sweden and in Black when I'm in Wales.

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