BPFK Section: Hesitation
wrote:
>
> > Re: BPFK Section: Hesitation
> > >zo pavyseljirna cu vasru .y. bu
> > I think this should be {zo pavyseljirna cu
> vasru me'o .y. bu}. As it stands,
> > it means "The word 'unicorn' contains
> yttrium" (or whatever the letter 'y',
> > used as a pronoun, stands for). -phma
>
> Right. {zo pavyseljirna cu vasru .y. bu} really
> means
> "'pavyseljirna' contains it", where 'it' refers
> to something
> of the y-gender. Probably {me'o y bu} itself
> would be
> of y-gender, but the rules for establishing the
> BY-gender of
> sumti other than the very basic cases are not
> clear. So, if
> we are talking about {me'o y bu}, {y bu} could
> be used to
> refer to {me'o y bu}. Since {zo pavyseljirna}
> is a word, and
> words only contain letters, and the most likely
> letter to be
> referred with the pronoun {y bu} is 'y', then
> the sentence
> would be understandable, but {me'o y bu} is
> better. (Even with
> something like {le blabi xirma} I hesitate
> among {by}, {xy}
> and {by xy} when choosing the pronoun.)
>
xorxes raises a nice point, which I have not seen
discussed, though I am sure it has been. In the
desperate hope of getting a usable anaphora
system, "gender" seems the only hope-- dividing
expressions into classes and then referring back
to expressions as being the relevant one of its
class. Since "natural gender" - masculine,
feminine, neuter; animate, inanimate; small round
things, large straight things; things owned by
the emperor, things drawn with camel-hair
brushes; and so on - are for the most part
hopelessly arbitrary (abstractions and boats are
feminine — even the James Forrestal; diminutives
are neuter; books but also the tallest mountain
in Africa are small things) and so requiring
learning each case separately and since Lojban
has not declensions or the like, the letters of
the words involved become the default
classifiers. And the first letters at that,
being the most obvious and (hopefully)memorable.
But when there are choices, which does one
choose? Is {le blabi zdani} to be anaphorized as
{zy} or {by} or {by zy}. The answer pretty
generally is the shortest that is distinctive,
preferring the modified to the modifier. So {zy}
if there are no other z words, but {by zy} (or
maybe just {by} if there are other houses in the
discussion — or other z words generally. And if
we get down to a context with {le blabi zdani}
and {le blanu zdani} and {le blaci zdani} we fall
back on baisc anaphora, literal repetition of as
much as is deistinctive: :{le blabi}, {le blanu}
and {le blaci}, unless there are other blue,
white and glass things around, in which case we
need full repetition. Messy but workable up to a
point — a more remote one than positional
systems, for example.