From lojbab@lojban.org Sun Sep 09 00:25:55 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: lojbab@lojban.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_1); 9 Sep 2001 07:25:55 -0000 Received: (qmail 59302 invoked from network); 9 Sep 2001 07:25:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 9 Sep 2001 07:25:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO stmpy-3.cais.net) (205.252.14.73) by mta3 with SMTP; 9 Sep 2001 07:25:53 -0000 Received: from user.lojban.org (dynamic101.cl7.cais.net [205.177.20.101]) by stmpy-3.cais.net (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f897Pnn75956 for ; Sun, 9 Sep 2001 03:25:50 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20010909030642.00d7a750@pop.cais.com> X-Sender: vir1036@pop.cais.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.2 Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2001 03:23:52 -0400 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Mark on wiki on lerfu In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" At 07:51 PM 9/8/01 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote: It is nice to ahve all these tools available for choices, >but we do not need them to do the work (we don't even need the fo'V set, >rpobably, as witness there heavy use so far.) It is not a question of need, but rather of usefulness. By having the lerfu, we have a mnemonic method for people who find that advantageous (but if I needed anaphors for Dave and Dan (not to mention djan) the lerfu solution is more pragmatically difficult. The ko'a and fo'a series are useful for assigning because they do NOT imply a mnemonic and you EXPECT them to be explicitly assigned. The existence of two series of ko'a/fo'a allows one to arbitrarily establish two groups based on first letter, and some larger number of groups based on final vowel or on subscripting (lerfu of course give 17 groups, leading to Cowan's claim that Lojban is the only language with 17 genders. Gender (the non-grammatical kind) of course is one reason for being able to group anaphors. You could have a convention that ko'V is used for males and fo'V for females, or in a dispute use members of each series to represent different camps ("them", and "the others"). I vaguely recall that Athelstan may have used both series in his translation of Saki's _The Open Window_ but I can't recall the specifics. The point being that we put in lots of approaches to allow people to use whatever approach suits their purpose, in particular recognizing that choice of how to anaphorize might have preferences determined by native language. Since JCB put all these methods into the language in some form or another (his ba is our da, his da is our ko'a, he has backcounting anaphora, and he has lerfu anaphora as well), I saw no reason to reject any of them in designing Lojban. lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org