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On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 06:38:48AM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote:
> Yes, here's the chink in the armor. We wouldn't want a CV that simply turns
> a pred into a nonpred. Nonpred is too vague.
> We'd have a CV to do the opposite of the above. Go ploj krajon. I use a
> pencil. Go skri CVploj krajon. I write with a pencil.
>
> So the conclusion here, really, is that you don't just turn a pred into a
> nonpred. You turn a nonpred into some specific category of function word.
> Or maybe you're not even doing that. Maybe in the CVploj example, you're
> just turning the pred into some kind of subordinate pred.
Oh. See, that's different. I thought you were talking about a CV-word
that would turn a predicate into a pinvor of some arbitrary category.
There is nothing wrong with turning a predicate into a pinvor of a
specific grammatical class. That's what Lojban "fi'o" would do if anyone
ever used it, it's what some uses of "bu" (which turns any word into a
letter) do, and so on.
I've mentioned before that I like the idea of turning predicates into
modals with a short word, and I guess this is an example of a pinvor
forming a "compound" with a predicate. It's not the same kind of
compound that you get from putting two predicates together, though.
Unfortunately, "ploj" is not the most straightforward example for
turning a predicate into a modal.
Say the pinvor that does this is "ho".
The sentence "go skri hoploj krajon" has two problems. One is that
there's no article before "krajon", so this actually comes out as "go
skri ho plojkrajon". The other is that "ploj" refers to the user;
"beploj" refers to that which is used, which is what you want the modal
to be. So what you want is "go skri ho beploj ta krajon". ("go skri ho
ploj krajon" would mean "I write used by a crayon". Yes, this is
counterintuitive.)
> > I think both ie and ki'a are overloaded. The gloss of "ki'a" is "textual
> > confusion", implying you don't understand what was said or what a word
> > means, but it's also used for confusion about identity. Loglan defines
> > it as confusion about identity, and goes on to use it for textual
> > confusion.
> It seems that way to me, too, tho I can't quite grasp what it shd turn into.
> I'm a little thrown by the fact that there seems to be no smooth way to
> distinguish between 'who' and 'what', and I'm wondering if there's a strong
> need to do so anyway.
>
> Is there a problem with using kwa thus?
>
> Zi ten kwa? What have you got?
> Zi ten kwa pe? Who have you got?
> Zi ten kwa xurnal? Which newspaper have you got?
>
> Or do we need one 'adjectival' what and one 'pronoun' what?
> You said elsewhere that we could just say 'kwa da' for what in the second
> sense, but if we did that, it would seem inconsistent to say 'kwa pe', going
> from pinvor to pred. Or, at least, it would seem that you should be saying
> 'kwa te pe' instead.
I was saying "kju da"; that "kju" asks for an answer of a certain form,
an example of which is to follow, and an example of an object is "da".
So "kju da" would just mean the same as "kwa".
"kwa pe" would be nice but doesn't work; what you want is "You have
what, which is a person?" So you need a pinvor for "which" (I'll import
Lojban "poi" as "poj" for this purpose) and the question would be "ten
kwa poj pe". This is how Lojban does it.
But an adjectival "what" could be a good idea. It would be like "kju"
except it would take a predicate instead of a single word, and it would
ask for an answer of that type instead of that grammatical form. Call
this "kja"; then you have "ten kja pe".
At this point we should start distinguishing between predicate-words
(morphemes that are predicates, or combinations of them) and predicates
(the whole thing including all the places). I think "kja" should take a
predicate-word, specifically, because otherwise it would require a
terminator, and if you want to say something like "You have what which
throws the ball?" you should just use poj.
Now a question. Is Ceqli going to have capitalization and punctuation,
as in your examples? Lojban doesn't. (Well, you can put punctuation in
Lojban, such as << >> around lu...li'u for quotes, but the punctuation
doesn't mean anything.)
--
Rob Speer