Subject: Re: Dumb answers to good questions

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 13:15:13 -0700 (PDT)

cu'u la .aulun

>Hebrew "davka" (dvkh) or Yiddish "davke" (dvvk') have similar
>counterparts in German.
>davka: "gerade", desto trotz, "ausgerechnet"

Oh, now I'm with you. I was always amused that the German translation of
the TV series "Northern Exposure" was "Alaska ausgerechnet" --- "Alaska,
of all places!" (which, from what little I remember of it, was pretty much
Joel Fleischman's constant reaction.) Now, there, it's more like
{jectrxalaska .ue}; but of course, there, it isn't even a complete
sentence to distinguish focus from theme in.

>Don't think that Lojban has a word for this purpose, but why not use {fa,
>fe, fi, fo, fu} positioning for it? (the Book is mentioning this!)

Does the book explicitly say that positioning has such theme-rheme
effects? I know that in natural languages, that's the real reason you
shuffle word order (which is why journalistic Greek has always seemed to
me unnatural --- they don't do it); but it's not actually The Lojban Way
to leave this without an explicit marker...

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing I REJECT {gumri}
[email-masked] (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)