Subject: Re: [lojban] Tidying notes on {goi}

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 10:52:19 EDT

In a message dated 7/25/2001 9:48:39 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> What has the world come to? I thought pc was going to be horrified
> at this new binding of an already bound variable!
> 

Yes, I should, but i have lived with it for a quarter century in my Logical 
Language guise, so it seems quite natural to me (and a remarkably useful 
device when you look at what Logic requires to achieve the same goal).

<Anyway, how do we read this then:

     ro da poi prenu zo'u da prami su'o da

Is that {ro da poi prenu zo'u da prami da}, or is it
{ro da poi prenu ku'o ro de poi prenu zo'u da prami de}?>

The latter

<I would say that the objection is that it is not strictly
necessary to fix one order. In the cases where both sumti already
have a referent, goi makes no sense. In the cases where neither
has a referent, goi makes little sense, but none that requires the
connectands to be in a particular order anyway. And if one has
a referent and the other doesn't, it is clear which one gets assigned.
Of course, the order helps when the listener is in doubt as to what
the speaker means, so it works as a measure of redundancy.>

If it is useful to fix order and does not matter, then I would say to do it 
(if this really is what the objection means): it is only handy in one case, 
but that is just the hard case.

<In any case, I find goi too cumbersome for actual use, so I don't
have a strong opinion one way or the other.>

I, on the other hand, over used it when people objected to the alphabetic 
anaphora.