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On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 09:24:32AM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > fu would most likely have a predicate equivalent. "fuq" to follow the > > pattern, though in Lojban things like that went the other way - words > > like "balvi" (future) were created first, and from there came the cmavo > > "ba" (future tense). > > > > As for "right away", that's what "zi" is for in Lojban. I assume those > > words would get imported into Ceqli. > > Yes, but it's irritating to have a whole new word, when 'pifu's meaning is > so obvious. Obvious, but it sounds idiomatic and heavily inspired by English to me. "A little bit later". > What do you think of And's comments? I suppose I could deal with it if the language didn't have a clear distinction between predicates and pinvor, but And's reason for it makes no sense. He says that it is unclear what is a predicate and what is not. But there's nothing unclear about it. In the Lojban grammar, which I get the impression it's Ceqli's goal to match, predicates are a very specific grammatical class. You can't include a word in the language until you know what its grammatical function is. But I do agree with something else he mentioned - that pinvor should fall into series that help to identify _their_ function. This is something I'd been thinking about already - starting the most common question words with "kw": Lojban ma -> kwa (what object?) Lojban mo -> kwo (what predicate?) Lojban xu -> kwe (yes/no question) Lojban xo -> kwi (how many?) Lojban also has a bunch of miscellaneous, infrequently-used question words that ask for an answer that is from some grammatical class. Perhaps this could be done with a separate word (say kju), followed by an example of a word from that class. For example, probably the most useful one of these is the conjunction question, ji. The conjunctions that connect two sumti (objects) are: .a or .e and .o iff .u whether-or-not Using "ji" as a conjunction asks for an answer like .e, .enai, .a, etc. The canonical use for this is asking "Would you like coffee or tea?", where .enai is "coffee, not tea", and na.e is "tea, not coffee", while .e requests both and .a says it doesn't matter. And so on. There are other series like ja, je, jo, ju; gi'a, gi'e, gi'o, gi'u; etc. for other kinds of conjunctions, such as between predicates. This is a really significant concept for a logical language, so Ceqli should make sure to pick some good series for these. But each of these has its own question word, which is often inconsistent in form. So perhaps instead of having a separate question word for each series, Ceqli could use "kju .a", "kju xa" (making the assumption that ja/je/jo/ju become xa/xe/xo/xu), etc. There's even a really infrequently used question that asks what place of a predicate something goes in, which would become "kju fa". -- Rob Speer