Subject: Re: bringing it about

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 21:36:51 EST

xorxes’ usage is just that; it is not official Lojbangrammar nor semantics.  
In the latter,as worked out over the years on this and predecessor lists, 
{lo’e} is indeedfor the average whatsit, and thus not what is typically being 
hunted – anywhatsit will do, even a very untypical one, and {lo’e broda} is 
by rule not tobe treated as an individual but as a fictive stand in for a 
more complex(hopelessly so, so far as expanding it is concerned) locution. By 
the samehistory, {tu’a x} is short for {le nu x co’e} or something like it, 
showingthat the x is not on the surface of the sentence but embedded a layer 
down, notin the world of direct reference but an indirect one – which may, 
depending onthe brivla to which it is subordinated, not have any veridical 
connection tothe world of direct reference.  We can oftenignore this fact, 
resulting only in anomalies of sumti restrictions (or takingthem as implicit) 
but whenever the possibility of logical error arises, we haveto fall back (in 
a logical language) on explicitness.
 
Note, by the way, that we do not have a special grammarcategory for the 
concept of average, but rather only a special member of thecategory gadri  
for a particular way oftalking of certain statistical information. That way 
is (like the x in {tu’a x} ) not open to quantification nor toclaims that it 
exists as an individual, so xorxes’ usage is at leastanalogical, though 
inaccurate.  Ofcourse, none of this applies to {sisku}, which got defined in 
this messy way inan earlier attempt to avoid the same problem that {tu’a} 
finally solve moregenerally, and probably should be moved back to something 
more natural, sinceit is hard to say what one wants now. The temptation is 
always to move to some other brivla in these cases.
 
 Hope we are not going to get bogged down in this one again.