Re: TECH: empathy in attitudinals (proposal)

[jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU]

John Cowan writes:

> However, there has been an increasing pull toward allowing attitudinals,
> suitably marked, to express other people's feelings as well.  In particular,
> "se'inai" has been employed as an attitudinal modifier for this purpose.

I have found it useful for attitudinals to describe the attitude of the
subject of the bridi which the attitudinal is in.  In the most common
usages this will be the speaker, and a fair number of other-person usages
are also subsumed automatically.  If in addition you are allowed to
treat the UI as if it were a BAI (sumti tcita) you can designate the
person who has the attitude explicitly when needed, semantically like
a little subordinate clause.

The syntax for UI<->BAI emulation was the equivalent of:
        broda ui be do
to mean "broda which you're happy about".  In other words, a sumti
normally just sticks to the selbri, but when the "be" glue
word appears the sumti will stick to the preceeding item, in this case
a UI rather than another sumti.

Of course this was all worked out for Old Loglan.  Some of the new
UI's in Lojban may be more speaker-tropic than the old ones -- and in
fact I was very tempted to make a blanket exception that ua-ue-ui-uo-uu
always referred to the speaker, not the subject.  Also there was a strong
distinction between "discursives" and "attitudinals", and the item
related by the discursives was usually or always "the previous discourse"
rather than "the speaker".  (Example: le bi'u cribe = the bear which is
absent from the previous discourse, not the bear which the speaker is
not familiar with.)  The point of these weaselwords is that we should
specify with each UI a default argument selected from speaker, subject
or previous discourse.

                -- jimc