Subject: mine, thine, hisn, hern, itsn ourn, yourn and theirn (was[lojban] si'o)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:37:28 EDT

In a message dated 8/24/2001 2:32:21 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> (damn, I miss the real and useful {me}),
> 
> When we went along with TLI on the change in me, we had determined that 
> there was an easy alternate way to do the old me. Why is it unsatisfactory?
> 

How does it go exactly? I remember a thread a few weeks ago that went on for 
some time trying to find a way to say "mine" (the first fully functional 
concept of the average human infant -- I wonder if anyone has ever tested 
whether "I" is first understood at what can safely use what is mine). 
Eventually the thread came up with something that worked for the specific 
case, but was not generalizable. So, the "easy alternate way" is either 
hard, doesn't work or is not widely known. "x1 is subject to a nonessential 
defensible and defeasible claim to privileged association or use by x2" is 
what in Lojban?
(History lesson for newbies. JCB invented (presumably stole from someone in 
the anonymous hordes) this notion (not so fully defined) and assigned it to 
{me}. Like most of his "inventions," he overused this one to the point where 
it was unclear just what it meant. At some point it was decided to give it a 
precise meaning again, keeping the grammar as a two-place brivla. The 
meaning hit upon was "x1 is one of the things referred to by x2," either 
because that was a pretty good approximation to its most common use at the 
time or because there was a felt need to do something to prevent people from 
translating "John is a man" as {la djan du lo ninmu}, which, while both 
grammatically and logically correct -- and thus better than the average first 
translations -- was very bad style and probably arrived at not by analysis 
but by simply copying the English word for word. Something was then found to 
take on the old job, but I don't know what that something is -- and am 
apparently not alone in this ignorance.)