Panpredicate pomposity?

>Date: Wed, 03 Jul 91 13:43:04 +1000
>From: nsn@ee.mu.OZ.AU


>la mark. cfipu cusku zo'o .ianai:
mi ckire do ledo clite se cusku zo'o

>>Nick says:
>{ti xatra be'i la lojbab.} is wrong, and {ti ne be'i la lojbab. xatra} is
>right.

>The relation required is that which is alluded to in the lessons as {mo'u}:
>To distinguish between "(the cat ate the rat) at the mat" and "(the cat (at
>the mat)) ate the rat", with the first 'at' qualifying the whole predication
>and the second only the one sumti, you say
>le mlatu cu citka le ratcu vi le matci
>.i le mlatu ne vi le matci cu citka le ratcu.

I still don't agree.  At best, I could see maybe {ti noi be'i la lojbab.
xatra}, but not {ne}.  And this is hardly better than {ti noi se benji la
lojbab. xatra}.  I have a lot of trouble with selma'o BAI in the first
place.  Treating them as modals can lead to nasty malglico (like what you
would accuse me of), and other viewpoints make then seem redundant.  I
suppose there is the economy of syllables that you sometimes gain, but to
my mind, if the BAI words are simple shorthands as I perceived them in this
paragraph (and I know they're not), the confusion factor outweighs the
syllable savings.  I try not to use BAI too much for just that reason:  I
don't quite understand what they do.  I think treating them as true sumti
tcita simply makes a hell of a lot more sense than anything else.

The use of {vi} is different.  "vi" is not a BAI, it's a PU.  It's a tense.
Again using the inherently flawed grammar-checking method of translation,
{le mlatu ne vi le matci} is "The cat which-incudentally-is-associated-with
the-area-near the mat."  The {vi} denotes the spatial area close to a given
object or point (defaulting to "here").  BAI words don't work the same way.
You can use ne/pe to link something to the area (or time, for that matter),
but you can't really link something to "the state of being sent by lojbab"
without some snazzy extra cmavo.

>This usage was coined to help make sense of a dangling 'more than', as I've
>said before: by shoving an explicit {ne} link, you can answer the qusetion
>'more than what'? Consider the above as expandable to {noi diklo le matci},
>{noi se benji la lojbab}.

I suppose you *could* link BAI words that way, but it would have to be
using poi/noi, not pe/ne.  Thus,
mi noi mau do nelci le nixli   (you like the girl more than I do)
(I, who-am-incidedentally-such-that (something) is-exceeded-by you, like
the girl)
expanding to:
mi noi ke'a mau do nelci le nixli
(I, who-am-incidentally-such that I am exceeded by you, like the girl).

Hmmm.  This isn't really convicing.  I think Nick's really going to ream me
for this one.  How is the use of BAI any better than a regular selbri in
this sentence?  In fact, I'm fairly sure the sentence is ungrammatical,
since there isn't a proper bridi in the noi clause.  I used {mau} as a
selbri, which it isn't.  Again, I have trouble with BAI.  Maybe that's why
Nick prefers ne/pe, because then you get grammatical sentences.  Perhaps:
mi noi ke'a co'e mau do nelci le nixli
(I, who-am-such-that I (do something) exceeded by you, like the girl)

I still think that BAI should be considered true sumti tcita.

>No, that's quite right; consider it the other deep-structure mapping of {ne 
>be'i} It should in fact be done regularly; but it implies an embedding of
>layers which many might not welcome.

Perhaps, but it just plain makes sense to me.

>I remain to be convinced, MArk. You're advocating context-specific interpre-
>tation of {be'i}: that in cukta, what is sent by is always the x1 (the book),
>and not the audience or the topic. This seems to me too adhoc. On the other
>hand, my atitude will probably not be taken up as too pedantic; a look at
>the current place structures shows many places which relate more to the x1
>than to the whole predication ('made from', for example, which deserves its
>own BAI ({fi'o te zbasu})), and people will usually assume such defaults.

Not exactly.  I advocate using BAI as sunti tcita.  You're right that left
to myself I'd probably come up with context-dependent uses of it, but that
doesn't make the idea wrong, only my application of the idea wrong.  That
is, I suppose in some other sentence I'd probably suffer from a malglico
attack and use be'i to mean that the audience or the act or some other
place (implied or actual) was what was sent, but that's just me using the
word incorrectly.  In some way, you can sort of consider BAI (used this
way) to be like {poi}-bridi which specify selbri rather than sumti.  Just
as {le mlatu poi mi zgana ke'a} is "the cat which I see" (the cat such-that
I see it), {ti mlatu ga'a mi} is "this is the cat observed by me" (this
is-a-cat observed-by me).  NOTE:  I do not intend the ga'a to modify the x1
place (ti) so much as I mean it to modify the _selbri_, mlatu.  It doesn't
translate well, but think about it.  I'd like to consider BAI words as just
plain adding more places to a selbri that didn't have them.

>I, and I guess Jim Carter, still don't like your phrase, Mark; but I admit I'm
>probably in an over-analytical minority.

>>How does this sound to people who know better?

>The problem is that lojbab has not paedagogised on this matter much (it is at
>the end of lesson 6,with an archaic cmavo), so not many people will know 
>better.

Yeah.  I can't wait till lessons >6 are available.  

~mark