responses to Jorge

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

>You don't like my examples? Some of them were:
>
>   mi prami la maris du'ibo la djan
>   I love Mary and equally John.

Unless I am missing something, if you say ".edu'ibo", the current language
allows this.

>   mi fa'u do dei ciska gifa'u tcidu
>   I respectively you write respectively read this.

Likewise, only you do not need the gi.

I checked both of these alternatives  with the parser and they work.  Is
there a semantics question involved that makes the versions I suggest
improper?  (Actually, the semantics of fa'u are fairly undefined, but I
would have interpreted my version of the sentence per your translation.

>But that could also mean "John is given more than Mary".
>To disambiguate, using {ke'a}:
>
>     la djan zmadu la maris le ka ke'a dunda
>     John is more than Mary in property "____ gives something to someone".
>
>     la djan zmadu la maris le ka dunda fi ke'a
>     John is more than Mary in property "Someone gives something to ____".
>
>If there is another way to do this, I don't know it.  I don't know if
>this should be called a lambda variable either, but we need something
>like it.
>
>Since my proposal doesn't really require to change anything, I intend to
>use it in the rare occasions when it would be needed, and risk being
>misunderstood by those who don't approve.  (Currently, {ke'a} is
>meaningless in those sentences.)

Unless the sentence occurs in a relative clause.

Cowan had an alternate way of doing what he labelled as "lambda
variables" that didn't have this problem, and which I thought we had
agreed upon last LogFest, but I won't pretend to remember which proposal
came where without a long look at my notes.

>I do not propose to revise the terms themselves, only what is the
>interpretation of the tagged sumti. I'm not sure what you mean by their
>useful Zipfean function. What can you use pure ZI as tcita for? They
>have never been used in any text I've seen. Neither have the VAs, with
>the exception of {vi}, but this one is used with the meaning of {bu'u}
>("at, coincident with") instead of its own meaning ("a small distance
>from"). Although the VAs (unlike the ZIs) may be useful, they can easily
>be supplanted by existing FAhAs.

I'd have to dig, but am pretty sure that there is some usage of va and
vu as tags, possibly even some dating from the JCB versions of the
language (at least in spirit if not in actual form).  What may not have
been used significantly is "vazi" or "vuzi".

I don't see FAhAs as having much to do with VAs - they aren't
grammatically or semantically related to me.  I would probably interpret
"zi" as a tcita to mean elliptically puzi or bazi based on context and
the tagged sumti, since that is what I use the bare "zi" as a tense to
mean.  Perhaps with an obviously locational sumti, I might interpret it
as ellipsis for vizi+FAhA i.e. a short distance away in some particular
unstated direction from the point.

lojbab