Subject: Re: [lojban] Request for grammar clarifications

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 16:42:01 EDT

In a message dated 5/30/2001 2:45:00 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:
(I tactfully will not mention how many copies of this I received)

> > Well, the formula looks to be negative ("la"), and the usual trat is 
> "There 
> > is no God but Allah" so it might literally be {no da poi na du la .allax. 
> cu 
> > cevni}, which, unfortunately, allows for atheism, so it is not right 
> either 
> > -- for so does the cowan's version. As I was saying about quantifiers, ...
> 
> no da poi na dunli la .alsax. du lo pa cevni
> 
> "allah" turns out to be really hard to lojbanize. 'll' is illegal, as
> is 'la'.
> 
But {dunli} ain't {du}, two distinct things can be dunli in all sorts of 
terdunli but still be two distinct things. So this allows two equal gods -- 
or more -- as well as none and one. 
Time for doing to Arabic what we have done to Chinese -- but do we have a 
native Arabic speaker? I know we have some pros. I incline to {alxax} just 
because it sounds Arabic, but that is stereotypy and ignorance and who knows 
what it might turn out to mean. {alex}?