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On 7/8/05, Rex May - Baloo <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > >> Expanding all three so as to eliminate all ambiguity: > >> > >> Go kom ci sa baluqi. > >> Go kom ci sa baluqi sta ci. > >> Go sta ci kom ci sa baluqi. > > > > What alternate ambiguous meanings would the above versions > > without "sa" and :"sta" have? > > The ambiguity comes from the possible double meaning of ci, and I don't know > how serious it might be. > > Go kom ci baluqi. Might be interpreted as > I eat here a grapefruit. > I eat a this-thing grapefruit. > > And > go ci kom baluqi. Might be thought of as... actually, that one doesn't seem > possibly ambiguous. So, ci can either be a stand-alone word or a modifier of a following word/phrase. Inserting "sa" makes it clear that ci is a demonstrative pointing at the following word instead of an adverb "here". Is that right? Maybe a way to fix this would be to say that "ci" can have this stand-alone "here" sense only in a position where it can't modify another word - either at the end of a sentence, or right before a pronoun or verb, or another kind of word that it wouldn't make sense to use a demonstrative adjective on. > >> fei can, is able > > > >> beberfei portable v. > >> beslomfei breakable v. > > > > It looks like "fei" has the double sense of English "able", > > which IMO is a bad thing for a logical IAL. > > Esperanto distinguishes these senses as > > "povi" and "ebla". > > Well, actually not, as I see it. fei means to be able, so a person is > kanfei, (literate), able to read, while a book is bekanfei, (readable), able > to be read. It was either that or use another root for the -able meaning, > and this was discussed some time back and the consensus was that the > be-word-fei form was more ceqli in spirit. OK, my mistake. I wasn't reading carefully enough. (go kanfei berli :) > >> kraym crime > > Would "kanunbiaka" do just as well? Maybe that's too verbose, but > > if you had a monosyllable for "law" and a suffix signifying "act > > of violating X" then you could derive words for "crime", > > "sin", "ungrammatical utterance", and so forth prety tersely. > Interesting thought. I like it. Maybe take "yur" (zhoor) from Portuguese > jurisprudencia. Then > > yurbai. Legal, yurbia, illegal. yurbiaka, crime, yurbiajin. criminal > person. yursin - lawless, I think I like "jur" slightly better, but "yur" is good. The etymology note should probably credit Latin. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm