Re: A pair of how-do-i-say-it's

[John Cowan <cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan>]

la mark. clsn. cusku di'e

> Say what?  That doesn't seem to make sense to me.  I can agree that {ni'o}
> should cancel assignments, but {.i}?  Grammatically, there's no stronger
> tie between {.i}-joined sentences and {.ije}-joined sentences.  Maybe I'll
> go easy on you if you say I have to use {.ibo} or {.ijebo}; at least that's
> technically a bit closer.

I made an attempt at one point to separate simple ".i" from ijeks, but I
couldn't get the details to come out right, so we are stuck with an infelicity
in the grammar.  Actually, the shoe is on the other foot: any use of a bound
variable implies the existence of a prenex in which it is bound, and the
grammar says the scope of a prenex is a single sentence.  The extension to
allow a prenex to cover multiple sentences connected with ijeks is pragmatic.

> Hmmm.  I can see it, but it looks klugdy.  Actually, it may not be so hot.
> Look: the way I see it, this sentence is: "For all
> things-that-are-something1: [if] Anyi desires the-event: (something)
> is-something1, then (something) is-something1", using "is-something" for
> selbriness.  Leaving aside the fact that I agree with Nick that causality
> is not something you should have to do truth-tables for, the prenex isn't
> quantifying over all predicates, it's quantifying over all *things* that
> satisfy this unspecified predicate, just as {ro prenu} is all things which
> fulfil "prenu"itude, i.e. "all people". (ro broda ~= ro lo ro broda).  Does
> this make sense to anyone else, or am I missing something?  I suppose I can
> see how it can wind up meaning what you want, but not well.  Oh, how about
> {ro nu bu'a zo'u}?  Hmmm.  doesn't look much better, same problem.  I can't
> think of any way, grammatical or not, within Lojban's (or my own) framework
> to get what I'm looking for; how do you quantify over relationships?

It's simply a convention of the language that "<quantifier> bu'a" within a
prenex quantifies over the relationship; it's not semantically parallel to
"ro prenu".  To make it otherwise would require magic behavior where "bu'a"
worked like a sumti within the prenex and like a selbri elsewhere, and
the grammar simply isn't up to such tricks.  You should think of "ro bu'a"
as parallel to "ro da".

> I was kind of looking for a
> way to parenthesize sumti, to make them one sumti of a lower level, just as
> ke/ke'e braces parenthesize selbri to low-level selbri so the precedence
> changes....

Lojbab says that LUhI is indeed the right way to parenthesize sumti, even
though LUhI also carries the semantic burden of doing conversions between
sumti types.

--
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban