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On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 06:29:51PM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > Obvious, but it sounds idiomatic and heavily inspired by English to me. > > "A little bit later". > > Just musing here, but could we not say that a pred -can- modify a non-pred, > or at least form a compound with it? If a pred forms a compound with something, then by grammatical necessity that something is a pred. If "pi" can modify "fu", then if you try to say "The little one will sleep" as "to pi fu dorm", you end up with "to pifu dorm", meaning "The one that will sleep soon". It seems you're still thinking of "pi" as an adjective. It's a predicate like any other. > > Lojban ma -> kwa (what object?) > > Lojban mo -> kwo (what predicate?) > > Lojban xu -> kwe (yes/no question) > > Lojban xo -> kwi (how many?) > > I like this a lot. Does the yes/no thing really fit in there? I'd rather > use the kwe for your 'ji' below. And if we need more to fit here, go with > kway, kwey, kwaw. Hmm. My whole point was that Ceqli wouldn't need a word for "ji", because it would have the modifier "kju" plus another word. Maybe that's what you meant. Anyway, rearrange the vowels however you want. Incidentally, technically with "kju" most of the kw-words would be unnecessary. For example, "kwa" = "kju da". However, I assume that there's a Zipfean justification for having single syllables for the common question words. Perhaps "ji" is important enough to warrant its own word, then. -- Rob Speer