Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Binary Language

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 02:29:06 -0500

On Mon, Dec 24, 2001 at 06:10:15AM -0000, thinkit41 wrote:
> Decary? 10 arguments? I'm pretty unconvinced after 2, although 
> there may be a true ternary operator (none have given an example).

You have chosen to ignore the example. Certainly you can get out of
anything if you invent the appropriate words, but as pycyn points out,
all you're doing is avoiding the fact that 'give' has three places
(giver, gift, reciever) by making one word for 'give' and another for
'recieve', which between them cover the three places.

You would also need separate idea words for "talk to" and "talk about",
and "go to" and "go from", etc. How about concepts like "between" or
"combine" where the x2 and x3 are interchangeable? Or would you simply
leave those out of your language?

What you would end up doing, it seems, is creating a separate idea for
each combination of x1 and some other place, which is just a really
inefficient way of doing tags. Hence I maintain that if you're not going
to bother to use complete place structures, you shouldn't use them at
all.

-- 
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noi se zdile