Re: dangling participles

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

>Date:         Mon, 10 Nov 1997 00:24:21 -0500
>From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
>
>>Incidentally, Lojban (a constructed language based on predicate logic) has
>>--More--
>>*ten* possible pronouns.  They're all grammatically the same, and can stand
>>for anything - you just assign them as you want.
>
>More than ten, you can subscript each of them, and you can also use any of
>the letterals (in any alphabet) as a pronoun.

And even more relevantly, the letterals have a default setting, namely the
most recent sumti beginning with the same letter.  This effectively gives
Lojban 20-odd "genders": the gender of things beginning with "a", the
gender of things beginning with "b", etc.  Just as "I was with my brother
and my mother when she cut her finger" uses gender to disambiguate without
my having to repeat the noun, "le nanmu cu kansa le verba .i vy. se xrani"
disambiguates that it was the child who was hurt the same way.

~mark