cenba

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

Lojbab:
>Imagin that I am listening to the radio.  I hear many different speakers.
>I do not belive this is adequately expressed by the statement
>
>       mi cenba leka makau se tirna ce'u
>
>because this implies that it is me that is doing the varying and not the
>se tirna.

Well, you are varying from being {lo tirna be da} to being {lo tirna be de
poi na du da}. That is certainly a change.

>So what goes in the x2 if you say
>        le se tirna cu cenba

        le se tirna cu cenba le ka ce'u voksa makau
        The thing heard changes in whose voice it is.

>?  The whole concept seems backwards at that point.

It wasn't me who gave that place structure to cenba, but it doesn't
seem backwards to me. There are lots os gismu that take a
property of x1 in x2.

 >>The ones in page 261: {le pixra cu cenba le ka/ni ce'u blanu}.
 >>They have a thing as {le cenba} and a property of the thing as {le se
>>cenba}.
>
>That is a true statement about the examples.  But there is no commentary
that
>says that cenba necessarily is a relationship between a thing and a ce'u
>abstraction.  merely that this is permissible and meaningful with both ka
and
>ni abstractions.

Right.

>This leads me to suspect that any discussion of the semantics of cenba must
>ALLOW those to work, but need not be exclusive to that kind of formulation.

Well, what is the alternative? Something like:

        le ka le pixra cu blanu cu cenba le ka le pixra cu blanu
        The property of the picture being blue changes in the
        property of the picture being blue.

?
That doesn't make much sense to me.

 >I don;t say they are wrong.  I just don't think that they are defining
and/or
>exclusive.  And there is no commentary that suggests that they are/should
be.

You said that you could only think of properties going in the x1 of cenba,
so I gave those examples to show that you can have other staff there.
And I doubt you can put a property in the x1 unless the x2 is a property
of properties. For example, this would be acceptable to me:

        le ka ce'u blanu cu cenba le ka xukau le pixra cu ckaji ce'u
        The property of being blue changes in whether the picture
        has it as a property.

But this is obviously not something we'd often want to say.

 >It is possible that two ideas have been conflated in cenba, but I am not
>convinced of this yet.

Neither am I. You seem to be thinking of things like:

             "The box changes in what its contents are."
            versus "The contents of the box change."

Now, the place structure of {cenba} favours the first way
of saying it:

               le tanxe cu cenba le ka ce'u vasru makau
               The box changes in what it contains.

It is also possible to say:

                le se vasru be le tanxe cu cenba [le ka ce'u du makau]
                The contents of the box change [in what they are].

In the same way, instead of  "the contents of the box" we could talk
of  "the size of the box", and again we could say that "the box changes
in its size" or that "the size of the box changes in what it is". But you
always have to put a property of the x1 in the x2.

>ON one hand we have the paradigm (which was intended
>from the earliest days_
>
>cenba        binxo
>
>stika        galfi

{stika} and {galfi} are {cenbyri'a} and {binxyri'a}, right?

>On the other hand we have the contrast stodi/cenba (fixed/variable)
>which are intended among other things to include the mathematical senses of
>constant and variable so that
>la'eli x cu cenba
>la'eli C cu stodi
>should work (Maybe I need the Mex to non-Mex converter rather than la'e
>to be precise but I hope you get the idea).

I would have said just {li xy} for that. Then we have:

                li xy cu cenba le ka ce'u du makau
                x changes in what it is.

                li cy cu stodi le ka ce'u du makau
                c is constant in what it is.

{stodi} works just like {cenba}, the x2 is a property of the x1.

 >This last response is a bit broken up - we seem to have split into
discussing
>many spearate issues, which no longer seem clearly tied together.  maybe we
>need to break up the posts into spearate topics for each.

 i le selcasnu cu cenba gau mi le ka makau tcita ce'u

co'o mi'e xorxes