Re: reply to And #1

[JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

Lojbab:
>Jorge:
>>Now, something can begin to occur but never reach its end.  So the x1 of
>>cfari should really be a {du'u} as well:
>>        le du'u mi klama le zarci pu cfari gi'enai ku'i mulno
>>        My going to the market started to happen but wasn't completed.
>>
>>I couldn't use {nu} because there was no full event of me going to the
>>market.
>
>So what.  Obviously the completion of the full event is conceivable or
>you would have no means of knowing that it did not complete.  So you
>need the CAhA of unrealized potential on the nu to explicate the
>ellipsis.

Yes, I guess you may be right. So you would say:

    le nu'o nu mi klama le zarci pu cfari gi'enai ku'i mulno
    My possible-but-unrealised going to the market started
    but wasn't completed.


>> I'll try to make a list of the gismu
>>definitions that would need updating if this insight of yours were to be
>>made official.
>
>It won't be %^).

I know, but I made the list anyway. I was more interested in the
scientific question than in whatever is decided by ukase.

The list is pretty long, and it would include things like fasnu, cumki,
lakne, which I'm not convinced that really work better with du'u.

>In my opinion, you are merely seeking to define out of
>existence the need for "nu" and replacing it by the equally nebulous
>"du'u".

Not really, though that's worth thinking about it. But if I was to keep
only one it would be nu, if only because it's shorter. I think that
we probably wouldn't lose much if we had a single abstractor
instead of the overabundance that we have. That's because if
one makes sense for a terbri, all the others don't, so the selbri
itself is enough to select which one you mean. (I'm talking about
nu, ka and du'u. Obviously when one of the sub-nu makes sense,
nu will also make sense.) For example, the selbri {jinvi} requires
a du'u in the x2. If you use a nu there, I will understand what you
mean because I will simply interpret it as the only abstraction that
makes sense there: du'u.

Of course, we already can do this by using {su'u}. If it were a
monosyllable I think I would switch to using it exclusively, to keep
with the Lojban philosophy of not making unnecessary distinctions
but as it is I probably prefer to keep distinguishing between nu, ka
and du'u.

>I have no more idea what it means to have an expressible
>proposition (lo du'u) "happen" or "not happen" then I do for an
>incomplete event to happen or not happen.

The final meaning would be the same , of course. What we're
trying to do is find a logically consistent definition of nu and fasnu.
We understand what we want to express: that the ball started to
fall to the ground but the event was not completed. The question
is: does {le nu le bolci cu farlu le loldi cu co'a fasnu} express that?
Yes, we want it to express that. Then how should nu and fasnu be
defined? Can they be defined in such a way that we keep
consistency with other things that we want to say using them?

co'o mi'e xorxes