Re: lojbab doesn't like fi'o

[jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU]

<lojbab@GREBYN.COM> writes:
> I myself rather dislike fi'o constructs, which seem popular (at least on the
> list) these days.  I mean we only put the thing in because we wanted to
> keep from having an open-ended set of BAIs.  I tend to think of fi'o as
> a crutch for people who are trying to capture the sense of a foreign language
> closely, where that language has a word that adverbs in a non-BAI manner.
> (adverbs non-BAI-ly - now there is an interesting Lojbanization challenge!)

Whereas I see them as just another kind of subordinate clause, like
with poi.  It seems like about a quarter of the time I hit some
relation between the main bridi and some other argument, which can't
properly be expressed by one of our 65 BAI's.

There is one philosophy which says that the potential places of a
selbri are infinite in number: certain ones are numbered because they
are most useful, but you could attach arguments using any and every
BAI, and in a parallel way you could attach arguments in a fi'o clause
using any and every selbri, the which are infinite in number.  This
idea of places is interesting philosophically, but I wouldn't want to
have to write a computer program to implement it.  An alternative, much
more tractable, is to say that only the numbered places are "real".
fi'o clauses are, as I said above, subordinate clauses relating the
main bridi to zero or more additional arguments.  BAI phrases (also
tenses) in this model are simply surface representations of a deep
structure: fi'o clauses.  This is something you can analyse with
conventional logic.

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