Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

I just did a grep through various old texts (most more than 3 years old
since I haven't extracted such texts from later mail).
I did not find any instances of YOU Jorge using "jei" in perhaps 15 chunks
of text.  Likewise not in several chunks of Goran's text.

I found usages of jei in Nick's texts, several of which could be taken
as pertaining to an indirect question, and indeed this seems to have been
part of the discussion that followed posting such texts.  The discussion
of his North Wind text for example seems to be where the necessity
of having a means of marking indirect questions was identified, but it is
not clear whether the lejei usages were considered examples of indirect
questions.  Someone would have to read the discussions to see whether there
was any consensus.

But I suspect that you will find that even here, if there was such discussion,
it occurred in one of the endless arcane discussions that were already
happenming, and no one brought the issue to the attention of Cowan or me,
so that we never became aware of it.  Certainly, until I read this thread
more carefull than I do most, it never occurred to me that the usages
which jei was translating were examples of indirect questions.

This shows the weakness of such hypertechnical discussions.  They end up
having an effect on the language ONLY of those who plow through them, and
only then if they happen to agree as to the analysis.

But in any case, it does not appear that there has been a lot of usage of
jei in any form since the whole issue of indirect questions was raised.
It is possible that the final versions of Nick's text still contain
jei as an indirect question because he did not agree with his critics'
analysis, or because no one ever pointed out that jei was being used for
an indirect question.  It is also possible that he changed the usages -
no way to tell from a grep.

My conclusion is that this is an issue which has been discussed repeatedly
in arcana, and no one has ever asked "Central" what our intent was before now,
nor clearly reached any conclusions about jei.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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