Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 12:34:44 EDT

In a message dated 5/9/00 3:24:13 AM CST, [email-masked] writes:

<< Also, all addresses can be very well represented as tanrus, and this is
likely to occur in conversation

day 4 . 
which day 4 ?
month 5 day 4 . 
which month 5 day 4 ?
year 1999 month 5 day 4 .

In Lojban the default way of doing this is tanru expansion, with a special
particle 'be' available for transposition. >>
None of this looks like it is a natural tanru; it involves names 
ordescriptions, not predicates.

<< I have not seen any description of a Lojban grammar for address
expressions, and I also don't know how to express the naming relation
between "day" and "4". It needn't bee a naming relation, it can also be a
ordinal relation like "4th day". Or a diffuse relation like "4 day" as in
Chinese "si4 ri4". Diffuse relations (freedom from specificness
requirements that are not caused by the idea one wants to convey but by
the constraints of the language system) seem most Lojbanic to me.>>
Nor I, come to think of it. I suspect that these will fall into the patterns 
required by the messenger medium, which are probably not quite independent of 
language (the conventions are all SAE, probably even English) and all seem to 
be not quite consistently rightward (BUT apartment after street address, ZIP 
after city and state)
It is also true that I have not seen much about dates. From the vocab list at 
{detri} these are given as number strings with the non-decimal separator 
{pi'e}: {li so pi'e mu pi'e(renono)no} , with dmy order specified (the 
nearest to an official site, I guess). The obvious non-numbers would be the 
ordinals, as you say, {le somoi (denli)}, which then expands naturally to the 
right with the specification of the sequence involved {be le mumoi (masti) be 
le renononomoi (nanca)}, with some mods if the parenthetical preds are put 
in. And that could give a reasonably unintelligible tanru:
{le renononomoi mumoi somoi denli} or so. Abbreviated Julian dates start 
looking good. The vocab also says dates may be "unit values massified by 
{joi}" [?]

I still need a good definition of centrifugal and centripetal, since every 
time I think I understand them, you give an example that goes exactly against 
what I just thought I understood (e.g. section-tome is centrifugal, but 
modifer-modified is cetripetal -- I think -- yet I see these as being 
essentially the same pattern).