Re: ciska bai tu'a zo bai

[Nick NICHOLAS <nsn@vis.mu.oz.au>]

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Jorge Llambias jay'?
=la kris cusku di'e

=> I don't mean to be nitpicky; I realize it's just a draft,
=Do be nitpicky, because it won't be a draft for long.

Ech. Which means I'd better look at them soon.

Oh, pity ye the Nick, who is supposed to cough up a reading list on diachronic
functionalism (cedra farvi ke terpli ciksi ke bauske) or grammaticalisation
(gervlabi'o pruce) by the end of the month, and hasn't even started, never
mind completing Hamlet in Klingon or polishing off the jvoste...

=> (ta'o) I am a great fan of tu'a and of the minds that conceived of such a
=> word -- it's a little chunk of intellectual rigor boiled down into two
=> syllables.
=I'm not so much a fan of tu'a as a fan of consistency. I agree with you
=that bai needs a tu'a, although I've always used it without it. I'll try
=to remember next time. The problem is that the definitions are plagued with
=slots that allow object/event, while others only allow one type, and I
=don't see any rule being followed. For example, le se spuda and le se nelci
=can be object/event, but le bapli and le se djica only events. I don't see
=what makes the ones more loose than the others.

There's a rule being followed somewhere in there, and in fact we had the
discussion towards the end of last year (you were with us back then, yes?)
There *are* predications where object/event does *not* imply sumti raising,
but both object and event are legitimate arguments; the semantics of the
predicates are like that. An excellent insight of the Lojban design team,
not to read in raising everywhere. Personally, I'm irritated that simlu
is not treated as raising, when "seem" is one of the examples of raising
that keeps coming up in the textbooks, but never mind.

Personally, I don't think Lojbanists realise how far Lojban's making raising
a marked phenomenon (forcing the extra tu'a or jai) takes us away from
natural language. I myself use jai obsessively (when I do use Lojban ;(
--- it did even pop up in my IRC the other week, and I hope I was being
logged); but I remain to be convinced that it will take hold in the speech
community. Indeed, this feature of Lojban (which JCB wasn't even aware of)
is one of the *real* concrete reasons Lojban differs from natural language.

--
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne.   nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au
        nsn@mundil.cs.mu.oz.au      nick_nicholas@muwayf.unimelb.edu.au
            AND MOVING SOON TO: nnich@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au