Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: ka + makau (was: ce'u (was: vliju'a

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 13:40:59 -0400 (EDT)

On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, Jorge Llambias wrote:

>
> la ~mark cusku di'e
>
> >I thought that {jei}!={du'u xukau} and that was one of the reasons for
> >{kau} in the first place. Correct me if I misremember. It was
> >something along the lines of {le jei broda} means either "true" or
> >"false"... to the extent that truth or falsity can be substituted for
> >it.
>
> Those are the two competing meanings, yes. None of them is winning,
> as far as I can tell. At least I never use it with either sense.

I am afraid I can't think of any difference between jei and du'u xukau IF
the du'u + Qkau means the answer to Q. This is what I thought it did, when
I interpreted "le du'u mi prami makau as "the identity of what I love".
According to Jorge, this is incorrect interpretation.

Going back a moment, "le jei broda" = a truth value; a real in [0, 1]. The
ANSWER to the question "xu broda" is the same. Since we (me, anyway) are
often accustomed to thinking of "du'u makau broda" as the answer to the
question "ma broda", then "le du'u xukau broda" collapses into "le jei
broda". This is another argument for Jorge's position in itself; it
eliminates the redundancy and makes jei other than a special case of du'u
+ Qkau.

Jorge, I can understand your recent explanatory post better if I stop
thinking of "makau" and use "ko'a" in its place. Really, we are not
talking about questions so much as we are talking about algebraic
variables. And, since du'u + Qkau doesn't turn the abstraction into the
answer to the question, I really don't see why they are called "indirect
questions" at all. They are indirect statements; statements with variables
that are assumed to have known values that the speaker doesn't know or
isn't revealing.

mi djuno le du'u makau pu zarci le klama

Unless du'u + Qkau really means 'the answer to the question posed by
removing "kau"', why does the above statement imply that I know WHO went
to the store? I could know simply that somebody did go to the store.

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