Subject: RE: [lojban] termsets

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 22:45:45 +0000

la and cusku di'e

>This sort of coordination is very normal
>and unmarked in English. It's a shame that GA is not
>already equivalent to "nu'i GA" (so that all coordination
>is termset coordination), but the result is just averagely
>lojbanically clunky, and not downright unusable.

I agree that the concept behind termsets makes sense,
but I don't think that its Lojban implementation is just
averagely clunky. At least I find it very difficult
to make it work with the rest of the sentence structure.

The reason plain GA won't suffice seems to be that GA...GI...
doesn't have a terminator, so {ge ko'a gi ko'e ko'i} would
have {ko'e ko'i} as a termset. I don't think that would be
a bad thing though. You could always recover the present
reading with {ge ko'a gi ko'e vau ko'i}. But I guess that
will have to wait until the deadline ends (there is no danger
of termsets becoming popular in the meantime, so I expect it
will be easy to reform them away).

But anyway, one trick to avoid termsets is this:

ko'a dunda ko'e ko'i gi'e co'e ko'o ko'u
ko'a gives ko'e to ko'i and (does) ko'o to ko'u

I suppose {go'i} won't work there, and I don't know
whether there is something more precise than {co'e},
but if there isn't there very well could be.
Compare with the equivalent "afterthought" termset form:

ko'a dunda ko'e ce'e ko'i pe'e je ko'o ce'e ko'u

which is longer and also requires some forethought for the
first {ce'e}.

The forethought form with {co'e} is just as long as the
forethought termset form with {nu'i}, if the {nu'u}s can
be elided, but the co'e form is more flexible, so you can
say things like:

ge ko'a prami ko'e gi ko'i ko'o co'e

instead of the fixed order required by nu'i:

nu'i ge ko'a ko'e gi ko'i ko'u prami

which can also be replicated with co'e as:

ge ko'a ko'e co'e gi ko'i ko'o prami

So, my conclusion is that termsets can always be substituted
advantageously by another form.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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