Subject: So, wait til you feel a cold no-nose

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 05:03:37 EDT

From: [email-masked] (Jorge Llambias)

<<la pycyn cusku di'e

>I tend to take the whole exchange as an argument for not dropping x1-- in 
>these kinds of exchanges anyhow,where there are often several applicable
>anaphora (not that 'a recent remark' or the like helps much).

It may well be that in this case there wasn't enough context.
But I don't think that not dropping x1 is practical in general.
As you say, 'a recent remark' is not that much more helpful.
In English you don't really have the choice of not using 'it',
and it is short enough that it doesn't get in the way anyway.
But in Lojban, when the choice is between {la'e di'u} and
nothing, I often go for nothing. Not always, but often.>>
Agreed, in practice, but.... (Literalism rears, etc. -- and in this case it 
would've helped).

pc<<>What gets modified in grammatical modification? In the clearest cases,
>tanru, it is the referent of the modified to the referent of the complex 
>and I
>guess that can be generalized for subject predicate modification

I don't think it is the referent, but I'm sure this can be
approached from many angles. This is how I'm thinking of it.
Suppose we're seeing a black cat. I say: {ta mlatu}. Then you
say {ta xekri mlatu}. The referent (the cat we see) has not
changed, it has not been modified. It is the reference that has
been modified, it has been made more precise in this case.>>

Yeah, "referent" is wrong, it has to be "sense," that whereby the referent is 
identified. But I still find the notion of modification in this literal 
hammer-and-tongs way inappropriate (I never though about the English usage 
before).
pc<<
>(from the
>referent of the subject to a truth value or event involving that referent) 
>and
>so on. But I think there must be a more natural word that {galfi} to deal
>with these relations in Lojban in Lojban.

I haven't found anything better. {galfi} has already been used
this way in previous discussions in Lojban. It wouldn't be
surprising that this has been it's main use so far, given the
topics of Lojban discussions. But it is certainly worthwhile
questioning it and looking for something better.>>

Grammatically, X modifies Y just means that X+Y => Z, that together they form 
a new grammatical unit, whose meaning is a regular function of the meanings 
of X and Y (the function determined by the rule cited for the analysis). 
Neither is changed -- or both are -- but the one does not change the other. 
The places of {jmina} after the agent place look about right. It's easy to 
add an agent in lojban; how do you drop one? Oops, have to notice order in 
the full version.
<<
>pc:
>I still have some of the intensional notion of the perfective in my mind, 
>so
>when I read the {ba'o} I took it to mean (once i had figured out what the
>rest of the sentence was about) that that was the idea when it was written
>and that the effect of that idea persisted, in aprticular that the 
>intension
>was that I (and other readers) take it that way.

You're describing exactly what his English translation
means. I took it that way when I first read it, with the
English next to it. I can't say that that is how I would
have understood it without that help.>>

I suspect (see lojbab's contribution earlier) that it officially means that 
the whatever of being an idea came to a natural end sometime earlier. Even if 
the whatever is an achievement (a real possibility here) I don't think it 
quite works extensionally.