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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 19:17:26 EST

In a message dated 2/2/2002 5:34:47 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:
<PC: either {sei mi pacna} functions like {a'o} or it functions to
give
> {ko'a klama i mi pacna la'e di'u}. Neither of these is quite {mi
pacna le
> du'u ko'a klama}.

> Why are those the only two possibilities? Maybe 'sei mi pacna'
> functions to give 'mi pacna le du'u ko'a klama'.
> 

Try as I might, I can't read the stuff in the Refgram about {sei} to allow 
this: it is a not a metalinguistic comment on the discourse, it is simply a 
statement of my state of hope.

<The book does say that 'sei' is 'metalinguistic', but it doesn't fully
explain what it means by that. 'po'o' and 'da'i' are included among
the 'metalinguistic' indicators of UI, so I think that metalinguistic
indicators can alter the truth value. Otherwise, a large number of
pontential sei-phrases become useless. 'sei cumki' would be useless,
since the sentence claims the main bridi, and anything true is also
possible. Likewise, 'sei tolcu'i' would be useless, since it would
claim the main bridi, and anything true is not impossible. I think
that whether the truth value is altered is a matter of what the
sei-clause is, as it is with the rest of the indicators.>

I certainly agreee with the last point, though, since we are not too clear 
about the regular UI yet, the {sei} forms seem to be remote obscurities 
indeed. I don't see {po'o} as particularly metalinguistic, and certainly is 
not used that way -- it affects truth value in a straightforward way. So 
does {da'i}, namely by stepping out of statements into world creation; again, 
I don't see tht as metalinguistic, but as an operator for shifting linguistic 
function (like {a'o} for example). It certainly does not mean "I suppose 
that..." either.

<Barring that, how *would* you do adverbs? Supposedly, nouns,
adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are all collapsed into selbrivla in
lojban, but this doesn't work, as I assume that there would be even
greater objections to 'mi cumki klama' meaning 'I possibly go'. Is
restructuring the sentence to be the only way to do it?>

Actually, I have no trouble with {mi cumki klama}, though it means something 
different from {cumki fa le nu mi klama} and, probably, {sei cumki mi klama}. 
One problem is that there are a variety of things done with adverbs in SAE 
and so we need a variety of devices to cover them: one is just tanru 
("modifies and verb or adjective"), another is apparently {sei}, which 
appears to have yet another function somewhere.