Re: Re: Fractal Lojban Sentences
> The text of the sentence:
> mi nelci tu'a lonu do tavla fi lodu'u kei kei mu'i lodu'u losi'o kei bebna kei
> Is {tu'a lonu...} intentional? Is it needed?
> mi'e clsn
Yes, the {tu'a} was used intentionally, because it is logically accurate to use {tu'a} in this case.
Take the gismu {facki}, for exmaple. Its place structure is x1 discovers/finds out x2 (du'u) about subject/object x3. The x2 place of {facki} is explicitly defined to be an abstraction, because you can't discover or find an object, but only something about an object (a fact, {lodu'u}). In English, you might say "I find my hat.". But it Lojban (even though {mi facki le mi mapku} is gramamtical), this sentence is only properly expressed {mi facki tu'a le mi mapku} (assuming you mean something like "I find (where is) my hat") or {mi facki fi le mi mapku} (specifying the object about which the discovery is made, but leaving the discovery to be inferred).
In this sense, gismu like {xamgu}, {nitcu}, and {nelci}, whose x1 places should be {ka}s or other abstractions in order to be logically correct, are overgenerally defined. A thing is not good for something else, you can't need things, and you can't like things; but something about a thing can be good for some purpose (abstract), you can need something about a thing for a given purpose, and you can like something about a thing. Compare these to {badri}, {djica}, and the x3 place of {nitcu}, which are already defined to be sufficiently abstract. Gismu like {prami} and {xebni}, which allow an object or abstraction as its x2 place, walk the fine line between being sufficiently and insufficiently constrained.
In my opinion, not using abstractions in places such as these is malglico and, technically, illogical. I think that the over-generality of these gismu definitions (along with a number of other features of the language) reflects the fact that the creaters of Lojban were primarily native speakers of English. When I speak Lojban, I try as much as possible to avoid {glikemnorlogji} and to be as logically correct as possible. After all, that's one of the major reasons I decided to learn to speak Lojban!