Re: PLI: "except"

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

And:
>> >> > That is important not only to 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.

Yes, but using {cei} is doubly so. :) Anyway, I think that the {se} is
not required, because {cei} connects whole tanru.

> (I use guerxibernia
>because Ireland is not Eire, and not all people of Ireland are people
>of Eire.)

Then perhaps it should be daplxibernia. I thought Eire was Ireland in
Irish, I didn't mean to make a political statement. :)

>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.

I think that the way to get {po'o} to have the right effect in the
subordinate bridi is to use {po'okau}. After all, what {kau} does
for indirect questions is to eliminate the question from the main bridi
and restrict it to the subordinate one, which is also what we need for
{po'o}. Then we have:

        ko'a krici le du'u la djan po'okau klama
        She believes that only John goes.

        ko'a krici le du'u la djan po'o klama
        Only John is such that she believes that he goes.

But since people have turned down my {po'onai} for "except", I still
don't know how to handle that one.

>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.

They may be problematic, but I hardly think that burying our
collective head in the sand is the right answer. Besides, "except"
is much simpler than "even".

>I'd be happier if Lojban made as little use of them as possible.

Well, it won't make use of them if they aren't provided. Every time
I've needed to use "even" I used {ji'a}, but always feeling that
I wasn't expressing what I wanted to express.

Jorge