Subject: RE: mine, thine, hisn, hern, itsn ourn, yourn and theirn (wassi'o)

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 19:15:48 -0700

cu'u la and.

>ta me lo spaji me'u mei = "that is a set of surprising cardinality"

>Is it not a good thing to be able to say that thus?

It's good, if you can make the same substitution for any mathematical
expression...

... which you can, with mo'e:

li pa su'i mo'e lo spaji du mo'e lo camspaji
ta mo'e lo spaji me'u mei

So like you pointed out, xorxes could have still done this without me...
me'o moi. But since he doesn't like MEX, he probably wouldn't have stumbled
on it. :-)

>This said, when you originally came up with "how do you say
>_mine_?", my first thought was {da pe/po/po'e mi} (for
>restrictedly quantified da). (For specifics and for unrestricted
>quantification, the lack of an incidental counterpart to po
>and po'e means one must resort to {no'u da po/po'e mi}.

Same school of thought as my {zu'i/zo'e pe mi}, I smugly note. (And I'm
pretty sure I have actually done this in the past.) This is the old "{da}
means what it needs to mean in the appropriate universe of discourse."

And I have to take some smug satisfaction, because otherwise And seems to
like this too, which stuns me. Just when you think you've got someone
worked out!... :-)

***

Let me come clean; I think (and have always thought) Sapir-Whorf bogus (as
most linguists do, for ideological reasons); Sapir-Whorf is not what
attracted me to Lojban; and when I do get epiphanies in my Lojban use and
interaction (which has and does happen), they come from clarifying things
on the logical side of the language, not the non-logical side. Indeed, I
still believe there is nothing on the non-logical side of Lojban (and I
emphatically include tanru and attitudinals here) which is particularly
unique or special to Lojban.

This, I think, underlies many of my current disagreements with people (and
particularly xod); so xorxes, I think you can chalk up one more axis. :-)

Nick Nicholas, TLG, UCI, USA. [email-masked] www.opoudjis.net
"Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives
correctly; some of them were right." --- Harry Turtledove.