le la vei,on ckafyzda srinuntroci xipa

["Mark E. Shoulson" <cbmvax!uunet!ctr.columbia.edu!shoulson>]

Colin (>) on me (>>) on Veijo

>> *sigh*.  This is such a common mistake something should be done.  A selbri
>> can't take {noi}.  You can't use it this way in an observative.  Use {gi'e}
>> or something.

>Yes, it is common, isn't it? When I was playing about with the proposals
>which eventually engendered Change 20, I was exploring an argument which
>said that relatives should be able to be incorporated into a selbri,
>along with an idea for preposing both relatives and linkargs there ....
>(I didn't mention it because 1) I wasn't sure I could make it work, 2) I
>didn't know what to do about "pe/ne" used crucially to attach to a
>sumti, 3) I didn't want to give Bob apoplexy.)

Yah, it would be nice if we could do something like that, but I don't think
there's a way to define it such that it makes sense in general.  The
problem stems from viewing some brivla as "nouns", so {cukta} is "book" or
even "is a book" rather than some sort of verbal (predicative) concept.
Think of verbing the noun, and you'll find that a relative clause makes
sense pe'iru'e.

>> >.i ji'ipano zutse remna
>>
>> This is fine, but you should realize that it's not quite the same as the
>> previous observatives.  Observatives are sentences with selbri but no sumti
>> (or at least no x1 sumti).  The x1 is considered to be ellipsized, so
>> "jubme" is "(something unspecified) is a table".  This is a sumti with no
>> selbri, since it's quantified, and would likely be interpreted as "about 10
>> sitting people (do/are something unspecified)", which to me has a slightly
>> different meaning.
>Nice point. For consistency, ".i zutse remna ji'ipanomei" or
>".i zutse remna selkancu fili ji'ipano", or else
>".i kancu le zutse remna li ji'ipano" (I rather like this one)

Those work.  I'm not dead-set on changing what's there, since that works
well for me also, but if we really wanted to avoid selbri-less jufra (which
I think are to be avoided in general, though not necessarily to the point
of fanaticism), I'd probably rather expand the tanru in the simpler way:

.i ji'ipano remna cu zutse

Or, keep the tanru and do something like

.i zvati fa ji'ipano zutse remna

Whatever.

~mark