From jcowan@reutershealth.com Wed May 30 07:45:20 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 30 May 2001 14:45:20 -0000 Received: (qmail 92067 invoked from network); 30 May 2001 14:44:12 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 30 May 2001 14:44:12 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 30 May 2001 14:44:12 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA17002; Wed, 30 May 2001 10:47:33 -0400 (EDT) X-Mozilla-Status: 0801 Message-ID: <3B13B885.3000008@reutershealth.com> Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 10:56:05 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686; en-US; rv:0.9) Gecko/20010505 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: pycyn@aol.com Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: Grammar Clarifications References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan pycyn@aol.com wrote: > Does anyone remember what RH's reasoning was? Essentially that there was no way of representing what "me" means now, whereas what "me" used to mean is just "steci be" = "pertains to". > just why has identity, of all the logical primitives, fallen > into disfavor? Primarily because most English uses of "be" are not identity, so in week 1 you learn not to use identity for them, and the real uses of identity get pushed off to much later. >> It should be noted that they are different though in one important >> respect: {me ko'a} means "x1 is at least one of ko'a", whereas >> {du ko'a} means "x1 is equal to (each) ko'a". When ko'a is a >> singleton they are about the same, when it isn't, they aren't. > > Is this certified? Yes. It is this non-singleton case that RH was concerned with. > into the selbri.> > mi du le morsi mlatu (but that was already mentioned) -- and, as only a > referent of the phrase, {me} is inspecific (or indefinite or whatever). "mi du le morsi mlatu" means that I am the dead cat(s) in question. "mi me le morsi mlatu" means that I am (one or more of) the dead cat(s) in question. (Reduces to the same thing in the singular.) "mi steci le morsi mlatu" means that I pertain to (all of) the dead cat(s) in question. -- There is / one art || John Cowan no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein