belated ressponse to Jorge: bu'uvi

["Dylan P. Thurston" <dpt@abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>]

la xorxes. cusku di'e
 > >I certainly prefer a new KOhA to a new PA to do the job, but I doubt
 > >that it is worth it. Even in the examples I gave, {ke'a} could be
 > >ellipsized quite easily. When there is no {ke'a}, and one is needed
 > >to make things clear, the obvious assumption is that the {ke'a} goes
 > >in the first empty slot, so:
 > >
 > >        la djan zmadu la maris le ka dunda
 > >        John exceeds Mary as a giver.
 > >
 > >        la djan zmadu la maris le ka te dunda
 > >        John exceeds Mary in being given somnething.
 > >
 > >I don't really think it is a problem to use {ke'a} for this, and I hate
 > >to introduce a new cmavo that is probably practically never going to
 > >get used. However, if there is going to be one, then I'd much rather
 > >have it in {KOhA} space, and not as a modifier of {da}.

.i la lojbab. cusku di'e
 > I'll second this.  I tend to want to avoid using "da" unless I wish to
 > explicitly invoke quantificational logic.

I'm not sure if this {zo'o} word from on high settles the issue.  If
not, I'd like to point out that Jorge's two examples can be
distinguished with the current system:  they are, respectively,

        la djan. zmadu la maris. le se ckaji be rolo dunda
        John exceed Mary in the property all givers have.

        la djan. zmadu la maris. le se ckaji be rolo se dunda
        John exceed Mary in the property all gift-receivers have

Note that this can be further glossed to include a relative close:  {lu
rolo dunda li'u dunli lu roda poi ke'a dunda li'u}.  So the use of
{ke'a} here is grammatically & semantically sound.

The same can be done with {li'i} (using {lifre}) (and the others:  I
think {le si'o ke'a dunda} means naturally "the quality of being a
giver".)

{pe'i} The only issue is then a pragmatic one:  whether this will
conflict with the relative clause use of {ke'a} too often.  After all,
with the introduction of {voi} all sumti of the form {le broda} can be
analyzed with relative clauses; but allowing {ke'a} in this case would
conflict too often with the relative clause use.  But I think it's
justified to use {ke'a} here, since it's a complicated construction and
the gloss above is so awkward.

There's also the problem pc brings up:
John E. Clifford writes:
 >         ...  The biggest problem with making
 >         full use of this insertion procedure is remembering how to do
 >         order n-tuples.  "John loves Marry more than Harry Sally" is
 >         something along the line of
 >         la djan ? la maris zmadu la xeris ? la selis le ka prami
 >         but "John loves Mary more than (he does) Sally" is simply
 >         la maris zmadu la selis le ka la djan prami (or se prami la
 >         djan). ...

I'm still confused by this, but perhaps it could be written

        la djan. ce'obo la maris. zmadu la xeris. ce'obo la selis.
                le ka le pamoi be ke'a cu prami le remoi be ke'a

which would, I expect, be elipsized to

        la djan. ce'obo la maris. zmadu la xeris. ce'obo la selis.
                le ka prami

Does this settle the issue?  If pc still likes lambda variables, I'd
appreciate a new exposition and, preferably, a new name: {pe'i} lambda
calculus is useful for naming the arguments to an unnamed function,
which is the reverse of the situation here.

mu'o mi'e. dilyn.