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

From: "Adam Raizen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 15:02:56 +0200

la pycyn. cusku di'e

> > 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).

I assume that you meant 'ko'a klama', and I'm switching 'a'o' to 'sei
mi pacna' in order to avoid the additudinal issues, without claiming
that they are equivalent. I wasn't claiming that 'sei mi pacni ko'a
klama' has the same truth conditions as 'ko'a klama', but that it has
the same truth conditions as 'mi pacna le du'u ko'a klama'.

> <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.

I was using 'kau' as the experimental marker of focus mentioned by
And, as was partially suggested from the discussion on how to express
the differences between 'it's me who went to the store' and 'it's the
store that I went to', and this usage is may or may not be related to
q-kau. It could have just as easily been an experimental cmavo, such
as 'kau'u', which I'll probably use from now on so as not to confuse
you.

mu'o mi'e .adam.