On Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:30:15 AM UTC-4, xorxes wrote:
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 10:08 AM, TR NS
<tran...@gmail.com> wrote:
My "gut" sort of revolts at this ambiguity though --I mean there is no way to designate a sumti in a sentence while being ambiguous about exactly which slot it is filling, is there? So it's seems odd to me that one could do that in a subordinate clause.
You can do that by placing the sumti in the prenex:
lo xanto zo'u lo nazbi [be xy] cu clani
lo xanto noi lo nazbi [be ke'a] cu clani cu mabru
Not quite what I meant since that still involves a separate clause. Also that seems like a sort of unintended consequence of zo'u, the intent of which was to be used with da, de etc. So I'm not sure I find its ambiguity any less revolting ;-) And actually it's worse in the case of zo'u b/c there is no default variable to use, is there? (or that what `xy` is?). At least noi has that.
I suppose the main thing for me, and the reason for my negative gut reaction to it, is that I don't find myself wanting to be ambiguous by default. If I wanted to be vague, then yeah having something like a little word to basically say "eh, you know mean" would be fine. I'd rather be explicit about my vagueness then the other way around. It's bad enough that people make mistakes, and the listener has to correct based on context. Encountering common place "vaguarities" in the language turns me off a bit from the reason I am interested in lojban to begin with.
Of course, then again, maybe there is a very good reason that vagueness *has* to be the default, which I am failing to see.
Thanks,
.trans.