Subject: Re: [lojban] Request for grammar clarifications

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 18:31:35 EDT

xorxes:
<The first reasonable interpretation I get when using it to add a
place to a selbri is that it tags the date of the event. >
Sounds right, but needs interpretation. I suppose that the date of the event 
of being a letter is when the letter is written, i.e., the beginning of that 
state, and this seems to work generally. So
<What does {la djan mrilu ti de'i
li 1892} mean? Is 1982 the date when the event happened, or is
it the date on ti? Is the {mrilu} relationship treated
differently than the {xatra} relationship? So Lojban does have
nouns and verbs after all?>
gets answered "NO, the {de'i} in the {mrilu} also marks the beginning, i.e., 
the time of mailing (an achievement so beginning and ending at once, 
perhaps). 

<But are Fords really ever called by the name "Ford"? Some people do
give names to their cars, but I never heard anyone name their Ford
"Ford". "Can I take one of the cars? Yes, take Ford." That's not
how it goes. "Take the Ford" is perfectly natural, but there "Ford"
is being used as a common noun, not as a name. "Take the Ford" is
just like "take the van". That it is written with a capital letter
surely is irrelevant.

A different question is whether {me} has the power to change a name
(only brand names?) into their common noun sense, so that {me la ford}
means "is a Ford" instead of "is the one named Ford". Unlike the
way that {me la djan} means "is the one named John" and not "is
a John".>

Thank you for reminding us why changing the meaning of {me} was such a 
mistake, leaving us without a natural way of doing this and forcing us to 
make up some apparently ad hoc fix. (What was gained or avoided by the 
change? Does anyone remember? Was it -- as was occasionally the case -- 
just incompetence of somebody in the inner circle or was there a real 
reason?) Of the possible ad hoc fixes, the one using {me} in its original 
sense seems to me at least as reasonable as any alternative proposed (come to 
that, has an alternative been proposed?) "Ford" (indeed, {ford}) is clearly 
a proper name and some weird English habit of using "the" or "a" in front of 
some proper names and not others (not all the cases are brand names, by the 
way) should not affect the situation in Lojban. Would {me lai ford} be 
better?