Re: TECH: grammar updates

[John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>]

la kolin. cusku di'e

> As I understand it, the SE that precedes BAI is not the same as other SE
> anyway. As you say, BAI are 1-place, and the relationship between BAI and
> SE BAI is:
>
> if
>         do'e            represents      fi'o broda
> then
>         se do'e         represents      fi'o se broda
>         te do'e         represents      fi'o te broda

Correct.

> > We still have the (pure) forethought connectives like "semaugi...gi" and the
> > mixed logical/modal afterthought connectives like ".esemaubo", and these
> > should suffice for the cases, if any there be, where such constructs must
> > exist.  It will always be rather indeterminate, however, what is to go into
> > the second position of such connectives, because of the inherent one-place
> > nature of BAIs.
> >
> I think it is a mistake to think of these as connectives. I think it is more
> productive to think of them as connectives plus tcita on the second
 connectand.
> This is easy to see for sentence connectives:
>
>         .ijeseri'abo co'e = .ije (bo) seri'a co'e
> just as
>         .ijebabo co'e   = .ije(bo) ba co'e

I'm fairly sure this is wrong, because I know that BAI and tenses are
not parallel, but I don't have a firm grasp on what's wrong with it, for
two reasons:  1) I haven't yet written the paper on place structures, 2)
I slept very badly last night.

> so I suggest
>         .ijesemaubo co'e = .ije(bo) semau co'e (whatever that means)
> and
>         xy. .esemaubo .y'y = nu'i xy. nu'u .e semau .y'y
>
> Thus the BAI remains 1-place.

Your account also fails to explain the "BAI gi ... gi" construction, which
works well for tenses (which do have an implicit 2nd place, viz. the
space-time origin), but may be very shaky for BAIs.

> > The Nick/Lojbab experimental cmavo "xo'e", which eradicates a place
> > (so that "da klama xo'e xo'e de di" means the same as "da litru de di"),
> > has been assigned the cmavo "ne'e" and placed in selma'o KOhA.
>
> I'm dubious that this is either necessary (has anybody ever used it) or
> a good idea, but I don't think it does any harm.

This pops up for me when I want to say something universal, but where the
natural gismu seems to want an agent:  "Living things are made from cells
[by whom?]", "Set A can be divided into sets B and [jo'u] C [who does the
dividing?]", etc.  English gets away with a passive here, because the passive
in English does not commit you to the existence of an agent; not so SE
conversion, which does not eliminate any places.  Without this gimmick,
the only way to eliminate places is to make a lujvo and just say "This
obnoxious place doesn't exist in this lujvo".  But (as Nick rightly
points out) there then needs to be a way to re-express the meaning of the
lujvo in terms of a tanru.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.