Subject: Re: [lojban] Another stab at a Record on ce'u

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 20:51:39 EDT

In a message dated 8/28/2001 4:54:47 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Whoa! How did we end up here?
> 
And made them up by careful misreading and his own aberrant version of Lojban 
(at a rough guess).

<3a and
3b both turn {le ka ce'u klama} into {le ka ce'u klama ce'u ce'u ce'u ce'u},
completely obliterating the meaning and actually _forcing_ you to elide the
first {ce'u} in order to actually say {le ka ce'u klama}. If I understand that
right.>
That was the point of the exercise, remember: to reduce the number of {ce'u} 
and {zo'e} that actually needed to be expressed, keeping as much of what 
already existed as possible but allowing fairly efficient movement toward 
more complex forms, should the need arise. Check the original; it does that 
fairly well. I admit that the short form 5-{ce'u} is a little too short, but 
it is the only one that works within the limits set (and it has its uses, 
though there are other ways of doing it, as has been noted).

<2. In ka abstractions *without any ce'u*, the first empty place fills with 
ce'u
   and the rest fill with zo'e. Where context indisputably demands an n-adic
   relation where the value of n is certain, the first n empty places fill 
with
   ce'u and the rest with zo'e.>
Simple, but unreliable ("where context indisputably demands" is going to take 
in a lot of cases for some folk, none for others). So use the rule that 
covers all the cases -- I've offered two that don't use up {si'o} or anything 
else and rarely require more than three or four syllables, regardless how 
many {ce'u} are needed. And agree with the first clause of yours (as it must 
to meet the problems conditions). Now, what is wrong with these proposals, 
especially the second?