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And it is ugly.
Here is a summary of my thoughts on ni, yet again, but this time because I
was asked:
Conceived to provide a quantitative counterpart to the qualitative ka, it
is redundant with jei and it's based on a deprecated notion of ka.
The deprecated sense of ka to which ni is bound was the miserable result
of the conflation between the English "redness" as the property of being
red (that's ka ce'u xunre; that which is shared by all red things) and the
amount of redness (that's jei ko'a xunre; it is 54% red). ni was supposed
to represent the latter sense, but that makes it redundant with jei.
Up the present, my discussion with pc on this had two outcomes: one was
the question of whether jei ko'a xunre is actually an analog of the
redness of ko'a. It's an interesting question but I don't see why a
language that actually intended to be used would offer any other
interpretation of jei. In any case it's an interpretive convention, and
that's how I use it, and I don't know of any contrary usage.
And the other outcome was: does ka have any meaning without any ce'u; when
the ce'u place is filled with a sumti, and ka's intended function is to
abstract away some completely subjective, totally specified opinion that
the observer has concerning the bridi in question. The concrete example
used was that "ka la godziras. cu cadzu" could refer to the "earthshaking
quality" that might be experienced should one be standing close to the
event. Of course, it could also refer to just about any other impression
or description of the event. (Now it's beginning to remind me of su'u
lacking an x2!) Anyway, that ce'u-less ka was smacked down about a year
ago, and such subjective impressions now need to come from li'i. Let the
skeptics who have forgotten the sound beating that ce'u-less ka received
enjoy the fine archives.
Some background on ni:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/10399
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/10225
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