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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 18:04:08 EST

In a message dated 1/31/2002 3:33:48 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Is there another way that truth conditions can be affected?
> 
The usual one is that they are eliminated. {ka'o klama} says that ka'o comes 
sometime to where we all understand (here, typically). It is false if ka'o 
never comes. But {a'o [or au] ka'o klama} expresses a hope or desire that 
ka'o comes and is not falsified by his never coming, nor, of course, by my 
being insincere about my hopes or desires. It has no truth value at all and 
is at best sincere or not and appropriate or not (the latter if the hoped for 
thing is known to have occurred already). 

<Also, I consider 'sei cumki mi klama' to be the
same as 'le nu kau mi klama cu cumki' (using 'kau' for the
focus-marking UI), at least until someone objects or comes up with
something better.>

I get the idea, but the focus job is explicitly limited to indirect questions 
-- in fact, using {kau} make this an indirect question, in spite of not 
having any other of the marks of one. Is the absence of cognitive predicates 
and {le du'u} enough to warn of some other special usage her? Maybe, but I 
expect someone to come up with a destruvtive counterexample.