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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 14:22:00 +0000

Adam:
#> "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.

I agree that "sei cumki" is the UI-like way to say "possibly".

However, what you describe as 'shifting focus' is actually in some cases
a shift also in truth conditions. The 'logical' way to defocalize superstructure
would be to leave the logical structure in standard selbri + sumti form, and
to indicate (de)focalization by means of UI.

--And.