Re: Panpredicate pomposity?

[cbmvax!uunet!ee.mu.OZ.AU!nsn]

la mark. cfipu cusku zo'o .ianai:
>Nick says:
>>The analysis is needed to
>>show why some omissions of {ne/pe} are nonsensical. Hands up all those who
>>treated {be'i} as a true sumtcita dangling in the sentence, instead of sticking
>>it next to the sent thing {lo se benji}. Mark, you're one of them %^)
>
>Guilty as charged.  (Don't bother flipping through old mail messages; you
>won't find it.  It was in a snailmail letter I sent to Nick in which I
>referred to a letter which lojbab sent as "be'i la lojbab.")  So how are
>you saying it should be used?  

{ti xatra be'i la lojbab.} is wrong, and {ti ne be'i la lojbab. xatra} is
right.

>So it should be "ne
>be'i la lojbab."?  "Which is incidentally related to sent by lojbab"?  I
>know you can't check grammar by translating into English, but that still
>doesn't work.  "ne" implies association or relation.  What is it related
>to?  I could see using "noi" or "poi," but I don't understand what relation
>is there for "ne/pe".

The relation required is that which is alluded to in the lessons as {mo'u}:
To distinguish between "(the cat ate the rat) at the mat" and "(the cat (at
the mat)) ate the rat", with the first 'at' qualifying the whole predication
and the second only the one sumti, you say

le mlatu cu citka le ratcu vi le matci
.i le mlatu ne vi le matci cu citka le ratcu.

This usage was coined to help make sense of a dangling 'more than', as I've
said before: by shoving an explicit {ne} link, you can answer the qusetion
'more than what'? Consider the above as expandable to {noi diklo le matci},
{noi se benji la lojbab}.

>mi catlu le cukta be be'i la lojbab.
>I look-at the book (sent-by lojbab.)
>See?  If be'i is a link to a non-canonical "place" of the book (cukta),
>then it deserves linkage with "be" just like any other place of cukta in
>this sentence.  Sorry if this is patently wrong (or, for that matter, so
>obvious it's already done regularly).

No, that's quite right; consider it the other deep-structure mapping of {ne 
be'i} It should in fact be done regularly; but it implies an embedding of
layers which many might not welcome.

>For that matter, I can defend the sentence you refer to, Nick.  As I
>recall, the sentence went something like:
>
>ti me la esperant. ke lojbo ke cmalu cukta be'i la lojbab.
>this is the Espish, lojbish, small-book {sent-by lojbab}
>
>So be'i attaches to the predicate of the sentence, namely "cukta" (modified
>by the other elements in that monstr tanru).  It's as if "cukta" had
>another place, indicating "sent by..." -- which is what I wanted!!

I remain to be convinced, MArk. You're advocating context-specific interpre-
tation of {be'i}: that in cukta, what is sent by is always the x1 (the book),
and not the audience or the topic. This seems to me too adhoc. On the other
hand, my atitude will probably not be taken up as too pedantic; a look at
the current place structures shows many places which relate more to the x1
than to the whole predication ('made from', for example, which deserves its
own BAI ({fi'o te zbasu})), and people will usually assume such defaults.

I, and I guess Jim Carter, still don't like your phrase, Mark; but I admit I'm
probably in an over-analytical minority.

>How does this sound to people who know better?

The problem is that lojbab has not paedagogised on this matter much (it is at
the end of lesson 6,with an archaic cmavo), so not many people will know 
better.