Re: [engelang] Xorban multivar bindings; "complements" - engelang messages

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 11:02 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 30/08/2012 15:07:
> It seems to me that it's not so much that there *is* an a
> interpretation. It's more that in exploring the production rules the
> language designers are trying to *create* an interpretation for
> something that is or might be made a valid production.

Given phrase [X.....Y], A in [X-fa....Y] will mean "the state of affairs in which [X...Y] is the case", i.e. it's basically just a way of converting [X...Y] into a predicate. If something has a meaning that can be the case, then you know what the fa version means.

I think it would be neater to change fV from a suffix to a unary operator, so that instead of "la refa bcde fghe dscvra'aka", we'd instead have "la fa re bcde fghe dscvra'aka" (equivalent to "dscvra'akoi re bcde fghe").

I find this unary operator idea far more sensible than marking quantifiers, but I wonder if it's needed considering that in order to express case-tags/Lojban-modals/serial-verbs/composed-predicates/whatever-you-say, we need to mark all the same-event predicates with a common event tag (see "ju" essay). Since we're going to need to do that often, it seems economical to simply reuse that mechanism whenever we need to do so.

On the other hand, maybe what you want "fa" to do and what I want "fa" to do aren't the exact same thing, or not quite compatible, or maybe it's very useful to have both. In that case, "ju" can be used to form "same event" clauses, and the "fa" operator can be used to get at the "state of affairs" gist of an entire formula. Or to put it in plain English: unary f- will provide a general mechanism to mark a formula so that it may serve as the argument of a predicate.

Yes, let's definitely do this. Let's change "f-" to a unary operator, and approve ju as well.

> For example, given the predicate "X discover Y to the case", "la refa bcde fghe dscvra'aka" entails neither "la bcdo'efa dscvra'aka" nor "la fgho'efa dscvra'aka" .
>
>
> I was going to ask for an examples (in Eng or Xb) in which it does not entail "la re bcde fghefa dscvra'aka", but now I think I see the difference you are intending.
>
> I have to confess, I find suffixing quantifiers with event arguments
> as a means of making the corresponding proposition an argument so
> utterly rebarbative that I would flatly refuse to use it. Most
> languages would just stick the sentence in the place of an object,
> possibly marking it with a particle.

That's what I think fa essentially was doing, except it was behaving like a clitic, suffixing to the first word of the phrase that is its syntactic complement. Hence it is neater to convert fV into a unary operator with no clitic behaviour.

Okay "clitic" makes more sense, but a unary operator is what we want then.

> lu la re bcde fghefa prpzcnuka dscvra'aku.
> "I discover the proposition of the event in which all bcd are fgh.
> "I discover that all bcd are fgh"

I don't understand how that means what it's supposed to, unless the fa is conceived of as a clitic to the entire "re bcde fghe" phrase.