Subject: Re: [lojban] {kai'i}

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 02:58:45 -0400

At 09:46 PM 8/10/01 -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > It is redundant only in a version of Lojban where you are not permitted
> > to elide "ce'u".
>
>To justify a new cmavo (ka) only to avoid the confusion from eliding
>another one (ce'u) seems wasteful and actually un-Lojbanic.

Actually, that sounds VERY Lojbanic. There are many places in the language 
where for *grammatical* reasons we have things done a certain way, 
including introducing new cmavo, in order to allow ellipsis and 
elision. All of the elidable terminators fit this to some extent.

It is also VERY "Lojbanic" to allow ellipsis whenever possible. Ellipsis 
of ce'u is not really different from ellipsis of tense and number; it just 
happens to be one that is uniquely meaningful to Lojban.

> It sticks out
>from the language at a weird angle; is there any other such case of such
>redundancy in the cmavo?

Plenty. Some of the language exists, you recall, for historical backwards 
compatibility. TLI Loglan doesn't have ce'u or du'u or tu'a or jai, and 
doesn't give a fig about sumti-raising, but it does have the equivalent of 
"ka" for its usefulness in tanru-like modification of a predicate per your 
comment about lujvo below. It also has the same grammar in TLI Loglan as 
their equivalent of nu, so that is what we did as well.

>It seems a lot more elegant to actually ditch ka,
>with the exception of lujvo.

We never attempted to design Lojban "elegantly". On the contrary, as a 
language workbench, we put a lot of expressive tools into the language 
which were of uncertain usability, with the expectation that some would be 
more useful than others and that this could differ based on one's native 
language.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org