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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 11:18:19 EDT

In a message dated 8/29/2001 8:15:24 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<>   1. All empty sumti places within du'u fill with zo'e.>

> Thankfully this is something everybody agrees on, and it guarantees
> that however messy ka is, there's an unambiguous way to say what we
> want.
> 
We've never lacked that, as far as I can see. What was lacking was a way to 
say it reasonably briefly. I don't see how agreeing about {du'u} helps; 
trying to do {ka} things with {du'u} is invariably the least efficient way of 
doing it (well, parallel to your {si'o})

<When we get to the stage of making ordinarily flexible word order rigig,
it just doesn't seem worth the candle. The conventions are just more
trouble than they're worth.>

Probably, but in this case, clarity required this move to head off another of 
your remarks earlier that we might delay saying what was going on until the 
end: set a tricky question, et a tricky answe, neither of which would 
ordinarily be needed.

<disambiguation in such cases can be done by putting ce'u in the prenex
of the abstraction it belongs to, and then referring to it anaphorically.
Plus the usual default rule that says that things not in prenexes go
to the prenex of the localmost bridi.>

This looks reasonable, especially since it seems likely that we would 
eventually get cases where the {ce'u} inside inner phrases were not relevant 
to the outer ones. Generally, I think the conventions for those innerphrases 
have to be the ones appror\priate to their own types, not to the overarching 
type.

<I meant "linearly precedes". "klama fi lo tcadu be vi ce'u fe lo tcadu be vi
ce'u", say.>
And I meant linear order, too; that was why I changed from place to space, 
remember.

<Xorxes, not xod. Once John's elephant is up and running it will be easier
to keep track of this sort of thing.>

Thank you. The miles of indented quotes that people use tend to make 
attribution a little hard to work out sometimes.

<Well, you can read the relevant discussion, but the essence is that we don't
need gadri for typical things, because we have the brivla fadni to do that
job. The other plausible interpretation is that it's the archetype, and
this seems to be the intension, which is then the same thing as a ce'u
abstraction.>

We have brivla for most types of gadri and other devices as well (as I think 
you have been busily demonstrating on a variety of other threads), but it is 
still handy to have the gadri for practical purposes. I admit that I am not 
too clear on the differences among the typical, the stereotypical and the 
archetypal, and I know the argument that the archetypal man is not a man at 
all (thanx, Big A), but it seems that if it is a {ka} then use {ka} (and 
maybe {si'o} for the stereotypical?).  

<Andban = the Lojban of somebody who pays heed to the reasoned discussion
on the list, and is guided by reasoned conclusions arrived at in those
discussions, rather than by vague hunches about what things are supposed
to mean, based on their one-word English glosses in the mahoste.>

One possible (but slightly loaded) definition, I suppose. It does not 
obviously apply in this case, though, so I withdraw the "Andban" and stick 
with "Nalgol," a word with a nice long history in the community.