"except"

["Jorge J. Llambias" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

>.i la'ede'u binxo na'eke mutce ja vajni besecau loi gugdrneire .e su'o
>drata zo'o
>
>This is a small and fairly irrelevant change except to the Irish and some
>others... :)

The little word "except" is another one of those that are not very
easy to put into Lojban. I don't think that {secau} works as used here.
{vajni secau loi se gugdrxeire} means "x1 is important to x2 in aspect x3
lacking some Irish people". Who or what is lacking the Irish? Even if we
suppose that the lack of Irish is somehow connected to the x2 of vajni
(a fairly groundless assumption), it is still not clear that we
want to say that there is a lack of Irish.

My first impression is that "except" has to be done somehow with {na'e}.
For example:

        la'e de'u cu nalvajni ro na'e se gugdrxeire
        That is irrelevant to every non-Irish.

That still doesn't work very well because it doesn't say that it _is_
relevant to the Irish, although maybe it suggests it. We could turn it
around and say that it is relevant only to the Irish:

        la'e de'u cu vajni lei po'o se gugdrxeire
        That is relevant to the Irish only.

But that is cheating. We want to make the "except" claim. Since "except"
seems to be much related to "only", I propose {po'onai} for that function:

        la'e de'u cu nalvajni lei po'onai se gugdrxeire
        That is irrelevant to the Irish only-not.
        (i.e. that is irrelevant except to the Irish,
        only-not to the Irish.)

The original claim was a little bit more complicated: except to the Irish
and some others. The problem here is that "except" has to be applied to
the two terms at once, so perhaps:

        la'e de'u cu nalvajni lo'u po'onai lei se gugdrxeire e loi drata
        That is irrelevant except to the mass of (the Irish and some others).

That seems to work. pe'ipei doi rodo?

Jorge