bu'a brouhaha

["Mark E. Shoulson" <cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson>]

Colin writes:
>John Cowan:
>> 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".
>In a sense, that "magic behaviour" is exactly what you HAVE got - not
>that "bu'a" is changing its selma'o, but that the sequence "ro bu'a" has
>a completely different semantics - as you say, parallele to "ro da" - in
>a prenex from anywhere else.

That's how I see it as well, with this distinction between the
grammatically identical {ro prenu} and {ro bu'a}, and the different ways of
interpreting {ro bu'a} when it's in the prenex, but not otherwise.  What if
you have a prenex on a whole slew of sentences, with {tu'a}?  Let's say I'm
dealing with some unknown predicate....

pa bu'a zo'u tu'e [assorted sentences discussing and maybe clarifying this
"bu'a"... li'o.. then eventually] .i ro bu'a zo'u mi nelci.

Now, here we have a {bu'a} quantified at the beginning, discussed, and then
used as a prenex >with whatever definition we had for it still intact<.  Is
this last sentence to mean "for all thingies, I'm fond (presumably of
them)"?  Or does the magic behavior of {bu'a} in prenexes kick in?  Does it
only work when it's not inside another prenex-determined block?

In related news, yesterday being the holiday of Purim (read your book of
Esther for details), I began thinking about Esther 8:1.  The end of that
verse reads (translation mine) "...and Mordecai came before the king, for
Esther had told [the king] what he [Mordecai] was to her [namely, her
uncle]."

In Lojban, we usually specify the thing told with a LE word, permuting the
selbri so it comes out to x1 and specifying, or use a NU or something.
This is all fine.  But here, it was *the relationship*, the *selbri* which
Esther told, not a sumti.  You might be able to do something with a nu or
du'u, but I think that'd lose something.  Here's one plan, using John's
interpretation of {kau} (which, incidentally, I think is incomplete, since
we've used {kau} to mean simply "known!"):

.iki'ubo la .esTER. pu cusku zo'e ledu'u ko'a bu'akau ri

...Justified by: "ester" earlier expressed to-somthing/one the sentence:
he1[Mordecai] is-in-some-relation(known!) with the-last[Esther].

Actually, maybe {co'e} instead of {bu'a}.  This uses John's plan of using
{kau} to flag things in {du'u}-clauses as what the outer clause applies to.
I'm not sure I like this; any more elegant ideas?

~mark