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Bloody hell! A terrifying number of messages in the last 24 hours demanding to be read carefully. Jordan: > poi'i gives you the identity abstractor, I haven't yet worked out what that means. Hopefully when I've properly digested all the recent messages it'll dawn on me. > and it is one of the few of And's (extreemly numerous) experimentals > which could maybe be useful. To me, they are 'virtually useful' for my 'virtual Lojban usage'! A lot of the proposals are attempts to address problems I have encountered even in my scant usage over the years. > I don't like that it reuses ke'a though Your modified SE+ka proposal is attractive & entails the use of ce'u rather than ke'a of course. The main attraction of ke'a rather than ce'u is among those given on the poi'i wiki page: it allows a simple way to 'reflexives', since multiple ke'a corefer while multiple ce'u cannot corefer. > Anyway, I don't see what's wrong with the definition of kau as it > is though. I think basically it is kau==paunai. And I don't think > it is neccesary or really desirable to formalize it more than that It depends on the extent to which we want a compositional semantics -- the extent there are regular rules that take the meaning of each word and each construction and derive a logical formula from them. I am in favour of a compositional semantics, but not necessarily in favour of trying to invent one where the lexicosyntactic form was not created compositional. So for example, I don't think a compositional story can be told about kau or makau, but for that reason I prefer du'au, because it is compositional. > (I don't see people trying to formalize the meaning of "ko", for > example---some things are going to have to be enough with just a > simple, informal definition, if you want to actually *use* the > language) "ko" seems fairly unproblematic, though. Had it not been, I reckon there would have been attempts to formalize it. --And.