Subject: Re: [lojban] conditionals in Lojban

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 18:40:44

la pycyn cusku di'e

>For as long as I have been
>involved with Loglan/Lojban, people have regularly used UI for assertions 
>and
>frequently assertions for UI, to the great detriment of clear thinking and
>clear writing.

I don't see why using assertions as a way to express an attitude
would be a problem. Any action, including asserting something,
can be a form of expressing. (BTW, Lojban does not even have
a clear gismu for "x1 expresses attitude x2", maybe {jarco}?)

mi jarco le ka ckire kei ta'i le nu mi cinba ko'a
I showed my gratitude by giving her a kiss.

mi jarco le ka ckire kei ta'i le nu cusku zo ki'e
I showed my gratiude by saying "thanks!".

mi jarco le ka ckire kei ta'i le nu xusra le du'u mi ckire
I showed my gratitude by asserting that I am grateful.

({ki'e} is a vocative, not a UI, but I assume it is more
expressive than assertive.) So what is the problem of using
assertions as a way to show attitudes?

As for the converse, it may be true that we sometimes use
some attitudinals to make assertions. There seem to be two
resons for this. On the one hand, some attitudinals are not
so useful to express attitudes. I can understand what a bare
{oi} means, or a bare {ui}, or a bare {u'i}, and those are
always used attitudinally, but when would you express an
attitude of obligation, for example? What does a bare {ei}
indicate? Or a bare {ai}? On the other hand, there is no
corresponding gismu to do the job. {bilga} has a
much more restricted field of application than {ei},
and I can't get any meaning out of {ei do klama le zarci}
other than "you should go to the market". {ei} to me means
something like "in an ideal world, this happens".

>1' ko'a pu bilga le nu zukte

Is that "he had to do it" or "he should have done it"?

co'o mi'e xorxes

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