Re: NU variations

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!bradford.ac.uk!C.J.Fine>]

di'e preti fila .i,yn
>
>
> Is there any real _semantic_ difference between
>
> lenu broda
> le jai fau broda
> le jai fi'o fasnu fe'u broda
>
> I haven't checked them all, but the rest of the NU appear
> to have similar counterparts.
>
> (Obviously there's a _syntactic_ difference when supplying
> sumti for the broda, or for the NU (or the tag).)
>

I don't think "nu" and "jaifau" mean the same thing at all.
	"ti broda fau ta"
is glossed as "this broda-s in the event-of that", and while this does
NOT have the concessive sense of English "in the event of", it seems to
me that "ta" is not the "nu broda" but some concomitant event. Thus "le
jaifau broda" is the event which, in some presumably obvious way, goes
with the broda-ing, rather than the broda-ing itself.

With "fi'o" on the other hand, although the BAI were not originally
defined to mean quite the same thing as their associated brivla, I think
they have been heading that way, and so
	fau	and 	fi'o fasnu
are increasingly synonymous, ditto
	seka'a	and	fi'o se klama
and so on. I suspect the actual difference is that in each case the BAI
cmavo is in principle more precisely defined than the FI'O phrase; but
in practice the meaning of BAI is still unclear in many cases (including
this one).

	co'omi'e kolin