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Re: [lojban] Tags and bridi operators






On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:39 PM, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:
We know that na(ku), quantifiers, connectives and tenses are bridi operators, but what about non-tense tags? Some clearly are bridi operators, for instance the causals:

In general, tags for which the rest of the bridi is an argument of the tag's underlying selbri would be bridi operators. Those are also the easiest tags to come up with a clean definition for. Maybe all tags have to be defined that way.

 
Either we make every tag, no matter what selma'o it belongs to, a bridi operator, or we pick some that are operators and some that aren't depending on what is the most useful / easiest to use. The problem with the second option is that it is a bit annoying to have to memorize which tags are and which aren't bridi operators. On the other hand, the problem with the first option is that it would actually invalidate a lot of usage! For example, from The Little Prince:

     (4) do pu djuno noda fi'o fuzme mi

The intended meaning is (more or less) "It's my fault that you didn't know." However, if {fi'o fuzme} is treated like any other tag, then the scope is wrong and the sentence suddenly means "In the past, there was no thing such that: you know it because of me", which is backwards from the intended meaning.

Yes, it should have been "fi'o fuzme mi do pu djuno no da". It's a very common mistake with causals. For some reason we always tend to give them wide scope, even when used at the end of the sentence. Very common with "na ...  ki'u ..." for instance.
 
This is sad news. Should we say {tai} (or even {ja'e}) is not a bridi operator and thus save the construction (and usage) or do we need to update our usage? Both solutions have their pros and cons, but in the long run, consistency seems more important.

I'd be particularly interested in xorxes' opinion.

I guess it should be "ja'e ... tai ..." rather than "tai ... ja'e ...".

mu'o mi'e xorxes 

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