Re: PLI: "except"

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

Xorxe s:
> And:
> >Goran to Xorx:
> >> > That is important not only to the Irish.
> >> > (Important to the Irish and to others as well, the unexpected part
> >> > being that it is important to the others.)
> >> .i la'edi'u vajni lo po'onai .ue se gugdrneire
> > i lae diu vajni loi ge jea gi nae ue se guerxibernia
> Several problems:
> It is not grammatical. NAhEs can't be logically connected like that.

We mustn't let that deter us.

> Even if it was grammatical, it wouldn't say what you want, because
> {loi} would have scope over the scope of {ge}, so you would be
> talking about people each of whom are both Irish and non-Irish.

Yes. Dimwit, me.

> Even if the scope of {ge} was over that of {loi}, you would then be
> talking about some Irish and some non-Irish, not about all the Irish.
> Even writing it as:
> la'e di'u vajni ge ro loi se gugdrxeire gi loi ue na'e se gugdrxeire

That's rather dissatisfying. How about:

  lae diu vajni ge ro loi se guerxibernia cei broda gi loi nae ue (se?)
  broda

Having to repeat {guerxibernia} is inelegant. (I use guerxibernia
because Ireland is not Eire, and not all people of Ireland are people
of Eire.)

> it still doesn't translate the English well, because the speaker need
> not be surprised about it. The "against-expectations" component is not
> against the expectations of the speaker (nor of the audience). It is
> more a matter of relative unexpectedness, it is more unexpected that
> it is important to others than to the Irish, but it need not be
> unexpected at all in the absolute. It is perfectly reasonable to say
> something like: "As everyone expected, that was important not only
> to the Irish".

You're right. I think either you must use some unwieldy circumlocution
or some novel device must be added. No novel devices are going to be
added. So this is something that Lojban just can't do.
Even if novel devices could be added, I don't think they should be
added with excessive haste, as with {poo}, because the semantics
of these "presuppositional" items like "even" are a bit problematic.
I'd be happier if Lojban made as little use of them as possible.

> I don't really know how to do the quantifier "some but not all".

Nor me. I was rather surprised when I realized I didn't know how to
say it.

coo, mie and