Subject: Re: [lojban] questions about DOI & cmene

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 20:47:16 -0400 (EDT)

And Rosta scripsit:

> My point is that that all the veridical relativizers should have
> nonveridical counterparts, and voi is ambiguous between nonveridical
> noi and nonveridical voi.

It is definitely poi, as it was designed to provide a relative-clause
equivalent of le, to wit, da voi.

Voi was added very late, and I decided that nonveridical incidental
relative clauses were not important enough to support with a special
syntax. In general, incidental relative clauses are really just
a specialized sort of parenthetical remark, and had I known
just how rare it is to make this distinction in the world's
languages, I would have lobbied for noi and no'u to be removed.

> > Because "sali" is neither a cmene ending in a consonant nor a brivla, and 
> > therefore it is ungrammatical. 
> 
> I'll take your word for it.

Actually not ungrammatical. "la sa li" eradicates back to the last
article, and then substitutes "li" for it.

> > Indeed sali breaks into two words, so the listener might take that string 
> > as "la sa li".
> 
> This seems a bogus argument, since it applies also to licit cmene, such
> as "la salis."

Not so. To identify words in a Lojban stream, one first divides it into
breath-groups (separated by "."). If a breath-group ends in a consonant,
then everything back to but not including the most recently preceding
"la", "lai", or "doi", or the beginning of the breath-group, is a cmevla.
The rest of the breath-group, if any, is then broken up left-to-right.

Thus "lasa.lis" would be (ungrammatical) "la sa lis", but "lasalis." is
unambiguously "la salis".

> I didn't know that unmarked vocatives were allowed, 

They currently are not, except as a whole text (utterance? I forget).

> [W]e could have permitted anything to occur as a LA cmene, not that 
> everything ending in a pause would be a cmevla.

We could have done that, yes.

-- 
John Cowan [email-masked]
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
--Douglas Hofstadter