Re: TECH: grammar updates

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

la lojbab. cusku di'e

> > If the result of the debate is that "mau" goes away, then we are making a
> > significant change in the language, since it is one of the more used
> > cmavo, to my recollection, as well as one that dates back to Loglan.
> >
> > I thus suspect that there must be a way developed that allows the pragmatic
> > abbreviation implict in the cmavo, and that there will be opposition from
> > the conservative forces otherwise (unless this is "slipped by" on them,
> > which I cannot support).

la kolin. cusku di'e

> I would say, let's not take it away, but let's discourage its use. (Indeed,
> at one level, it could even be used in teaching in a sort of "This is one
> way you might try and do this, and some people do, but let's look at
> what it really means").
>  As I've remarked before, there are whole swathes of older versions that
> are no longer regarded as kosher, most noteably implicit sumti-raising.

Nick got the shudders at the idea of killing it, too.

But what's left for it to do?  There's the rare true-sumti-tcita use like:

1)      .i li'i nunsma semau ro valsi
        An experience of silence more-than any word

(from lojbab's "Language" translation, JL15:78)

and there's the incidental "ne semau":

2)      mi ne semau do nelci la betis.
        I (who incidentally am exceeded by you in something-unspec) like Betty.

Even if pragmatics tells us that the "something-unspec" (the missing x3 place
of zmadu) is "liking Betty", and also that the missing x1 place of "zmadu"
is "mi", this isn't the classical comparative claim; it affirms both that
I like Betty and that your liking exceeds mine.  Nothing wrong with it,
but it may be more confusing than it's worth.

A scan through my on-line Lojban text (all of Lojban List, plus a fair
sampling of other texts) reveals very very few uses of "mau" in live
text (that is, excluding concocted examples to make a point about "mau"
itself).  The overwhelmingly dominant way of making comparisons in Lojban
as it is is to use "-mau", the rafsi.  All the uses of cmavo "mau" that
I found were of the now-forbidden type, expressing pure comparisons with
"ne" = "*mo'u", except for Example 1 above.

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