Subject: UI for 'possible' (was: Re: [lojban] Bible translation style question)

From: "Adam Raizen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 00:29:43 +0200

la xorxes. cusku di'e

> la djan cusku di'e
>
> >People surely don't write "cumki fa le nu..." because it is
> >short, but rather because they are calquing "It is necessary that
..."
>
> "It is _possible_ that ...". I often wished there was a UI for
> that...

The official answer, of course, is 'sei cumki'. Before anyone yells
that it's ugly or too long, I think it should be considered. It is
generally recognized (I think), that we *could* get by with many fewer
cmavo for many things, such as tenses. For example 'mi ba klama le
zarci' could be rephrased as 'le nu mi klama le zarci cu balvi'. I
don't think that the real reason such sentences are unsatisfactory is
that they're too long, in most cases the additional length is not so
much. Rather, I think that it's a matter of the focus of the two
sentences. We want to talk about a going and not about what's in the
future. In theory, all sentences could be 'expanded' into a 'logical'
form like this, with many additional super- and sub-sentences. Since
that would shift the focus of discussion, we have grammatical
shortcuts such as PU, BAI, and UI (in some cases); but since there can
potentially be a need for this with any selbrivla that can have
abstractions, there needs to be a general way to do it, which is
'sei'. Any supersentence above the sentence of focus gets packed away
into a 'sei' clause.

So, in answer to the question 'what are the possibilities?' 'cumki fa
le nu mi klama le zarci' is a good answer, but in answer to the
question 'do you think you'll go?' 'cumki fa le nu mi klama' is
off-focus. I would say 'sei cumki mi klama'. I guess that we could
easily force 'cumki fa le nu mi klama' to be a statement about going,
since all we have to do is ignore the first 4 words, but I would
prefer to use the structure that is meant, without glorking.

I had been avoiding 'sei' because of its use in quotation to mark who
said something, but I think it plays too vital a function to be
ignored in other cases, so I'll start saying 'seisa'a' in quotes in
order to show who is quoted.

Of course, one might argue that 'possible' is a common enough concept
that it should have its own single-word UI, but that's a different
story (and it looks like we're stuck with what we have). You could use
just use 'ru'e' by itself if need be (supported from trivalent logic).

mu'o mi'e .adam.