Subject: [lojban] Re: cmavo for emphasis?

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 18:01:01 +0100

Jay:
#On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 05:35:35PM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
#> Yes about {ba'e} as the emphasis marker. But what I said wasn;t
#> irrelevant. Viktor asked "how do we express this", I said how, and
#> Jay answered that users of the language wouldn't understand the
#> usage. In a sense I was arguing that Jay's point was irrelevant,
#> that what users will or won't understand doesn't tell us much about
#> Lojban.
#
#Users won't understand it because it is bloody well wrong, as you've
#now noticed.

Do people say "bloody well wrong" in Colorado? It sounds very British
to my ears.

Anyway, did you not read what I wrote? Viktor's examples suggested
he was asking about focus, and what I originally said was wrong in
applying to emphasis, but relatively right in applying to focus. But
that still doesn't mean that users will understand it, because the
users are not very competent in Lojban. (I'm not saying that there
is an established convention of using the cleft-like 'contortions' for
focus; I'm saying that linguistics tells us that it is in the nature of
language for cleft-like constructions and focus-marking function to
be attracted to each other -- the very fact of using the more contorted
syntax serves to mirror what's going on in the meaning.)

--And.