Subject: Re: [lojban] Request for grammar clarifications

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 20:29:13 -0400

On Sun, May 27, 2001 at 06:31:35PM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> 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?

I think that part of the reason {me} was changed is because {du} is, for some
reason, taboo. I know it's not good to throw {du} around carelessly, but
sometimes it would be the best way to say something. But with {du}'s status in
the language now, it would get more use as a lerfu shift or yet another word
for "ten" or something - out of fear of being unlojbanic, nobody uses {du}.
So, it seems that {me} was changed to incorporate some uses of {du}.

An example that comes to mind is way back from aulun's poem, {morji loi critu}.
The poem ended with, IIRC,

le morsi mlatu
me mi

Now I realize that {me} was probably chosen for the alliteration, but let's
forget that it was poetry for a minute.

It seems that aulun wanted to say "the dead cat is me", but with {me} it just
means "the dead cat pertains to me" - a weaker sentence. If {du} had been
used, it would make a powerful (though very unlikely to be literally true)
claim.

This is different from {mi morsi mlatu}, which would seem to be the most
Lojbanically correct way of saying that you are a dead cat, because the
sentence referred to a dead cat mentioned earlier in the poem.

Perhaps a better example would be the Walt Kelly quote, "We have met the enemy,
and he is us." Is there any better way to translate that than {mi'o puzi penmi
le bradi .ije ri du mi'o}?

-- 
Rob Speer