"nei"

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!BRADFORD.AC.UK!C.J.Fine>]

I am strongly in favour of making the change you suggest.

The relearning affects the su'eso'oje'i caca'a jbosku, while the gain in
regularity (which I value more than the gain in expressiveness in this
case) will aid the so'i.a'o ba jbosku. I have learned "nei", as I have
made the effort to learn all the cmavo (I think I've got about 95%),
but have never had occasion to use it.

Further, the main place where this will give problems is in
attitudinals, and I suspect that only the Tuesday night group are ba'e
speaking enough for this to be a problem. Certainly, though I use
attitudinals in my translations, few of them, and no negated ones, come
readily to my mind.

I do not regard as a defect a structure which, while otherwise regular,
allows expressions that we cannot at present comprehend.


			kolin