Subject: Re: [lojban] ka'enai

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 23:45:49 -0400 (EDT)

Nick Nicholas scripsit:

> (1) Humans impose patterns on grammars. If you've been told that CAhA 
> is a tense as much as pu and fa'a; if you've seen that every single 
> other tense has NAI; if you see no logical reason why you wouldn't 
> say CAhA NAI, then of course you'll say CAhA NAI. 

(Apologies for the botched reply earlier.)

You are way overgeneralizing. Here are the current rules:

PU NAI and FAhA NAI are contradictory negations. PU NAI goes back to
Loglan days: "pujecanai" is the same as, and has no advantages over,
"pujenaica", but it has always been allowed. Someone, probably me,
made FAhA parallel to PU.

TAhE NAI is polar negation, and ROI NAI is scalar negation.

ZAhO NAI is allowed by the grammar but not (AFAICT) documented in CLL
anywhere. I have no intuition about what it was supposed to be: like
TAhE and ROI, or like PU, or what.

All the other tense cmavo (CAhA, KI, CUhE, ZI, ZEhA, VA, MOhI, VIhA,
VEhA, FEhE) don't allow NAI at all.

My view: "No NAI in tenses". Contradictory negations can be done better
with NA, and scalar/polar negations more cleanly and flexibly with prefixed
NAhE (which is always allowed).

> Furthermore, if fixes are proposed as techfixes to the grammar (which 
> we haven't talked about, but seems unlikely), things would have to be 
> really broken; as in, ambiguous. I don't think {ka'enai} passes that 
> bar, since NAhE CAhA is, after all, possible.

Given the above pile of crap, I would consider a simple removal techfix.
You may all shiver in your shoes now.

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