Tentative proposal to eliminate NAHU as freemod

[John Cowan]

Currently, we have NAHU compounds for every NA word which create time,
place, and manner questions. Grammatically these are freemods, which
means they can appear almost anywhere. I think it would be sufficient
to treat these just as regular tagged arguments. "Na hu" as two words
would mean "at the same time as what?" which is entirely synonymous with
"nahu" meaning "when?"

The only downside is that sentences like "I tu sonli nahu dzoru?", which
is one way of saying "When do you sleepwalk?", would have to have the
"nahu" moved to somewhere else in the sentence. However, this is only
a trivial syntactic change; there is no semantic benefit to having it
between two predunits.

--
I don't know half of you half as well John Cowan
as I should like, and I like less than half co...@ccil.org
of you half as well as you deserve. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
--Bilbo

[selpa'i]

la Djan, ga cutse le nedfui:

> Currently, we have NAHU compounds for every NA word which create time,
> place, and manner questions. Grammatically these are freemods, which
> means they can appear almost anywhere. I think it would be sufficient
> to treat these just as regular tagged arguments. "Na hu" as two words
> would mean "at the same time as what?" which is entirely synonymous with
> "nahu" meaning "when?"

Yes, though I think the two-word phrase "na hu" would require a comma,
as otherwise it and "nahu" couldn't be told apart in speech, and then
there might be some awkward situations like "I, nahu" vs "Ina, hu" vs
"I, na, hu".

> The only downside is that sentences like "I tu sonli nahu dzoru?", which
> is one way of saying "When do you sleepwalk?", would have to have the
> "nahu" moved to somewhere else in the sentence. However, this is only
> a trivial syntactic change; there is no semantic benefit to having it
> between two predunits.

As I see it, there *is* a slight benefit, since freemods modify the word
to their left. So, "When do you *sleep*-walk?" as opposed to, say,
"awake-walk".

Perhaps the sleepwalking example doesn't fully show how this is useful,
but I think there is a perceivable usefulness.

--hue la Selpahi

[Randall Holmes]

I take this proposal as simply giving nahu its obvious grammar as

a modifier <na hu> (I dont understand the distinction selp'ai is drawing,

na hu and nahu are synonymous as far as I can tell).  I would be in favor.  Of course one then has to be more careful about its grammar, that is not surprising.

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[Randall Holmes]

Here is the updated list of proposals with the NAHU matter as number 12.

selpa'i, since you are about, I encourage you to weigh on Proposals 1 and

9; both have majorities, but I prefer to have a vote from everyone.

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 1:58 PM, John Cowan <co...@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

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[selpa'i]

la Randal, ga cutse le nedfui:

> I take this proposal as simply giving nahu its obvious grammar as
> a modifier <na hu> (I dont understand the distinction selp'ai is drawing,
> na hu and nahu are synonymous as far as I can tell).

Is "vi le hasfa" a freemod?

--hue la Selpahi

[Randall Holmes]

"vi le hasfa" is a modifier term, not a freemod.  Under John's proposal,

"nahu" = "na hu" would have the same grammatical privileges as vi le hasfa.

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[selpa'i]

la Randal, ga cutse le nedfui:

> "vi le hasfa" is a modifier term, not a freemod. Under John's proposal,
> "nahu" = "na hu" would have the same grammatical privileges as vi le hasfa.

Exactly.

The proposal would remove "nahu" (the single word) thereby doing away
with a useful mechanism, just to replace it with almost the exact same
thing but in a different grammatical class and I'm not sure for what
gain (but losing the freemod semantics and sytanx).

The preposition + hu freemods are a nice difference from Lojban and I
thought we weren't trying to make another Lojban.

--hue la Selpahi

[John Cowan]

selpa'i scripsit:

> The proposal would remove "nahu" (the single word) thereby doing
> away with a useful mechanism, just to replace it with almost the
> exact same thing but in a different grammatical class and I'm not
> sure for what gain (but losing the freemod semantics and sytanx).

My point is that "na hu" (which would have to be pronounced "na,hu"
is *already legal* and means the same thing as "nahu". That being so,
special-casing "nahu" isn't that useful.

> The preposition + hu freemods are a nice difference from Lojban and
> I thought we weren't trying to make another Lojban.

I'm trying very hard not to.

--
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that they applaud me thus? http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
--Phocion, Greek orator

[Randall Holmes]

Hoi Selpahis,

I don't see John's proposal as particularly Lojbanist :-)

I also think that it can be mulled over for a while, like all of our proposals.

It is true that if one wanted the parser to read na hu rather than nahu, you

would need to put a comma into it.  The two phrases mean the same thing.  If there is a merit to the present situation, it lies in being able to express ourselves more subtly by using the freedom of placement of a freemod.  I await interesting examples from selpa'i.

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[selpa'i]

la Djan, ga cutse le nedfui:

> selpa'i scripsit:
>
>> The proposal would remove "nahu" (the single word) thereby doing
>> away with a useful mechanism, just to replace it with almost the
>> exact same thing but in a different grammatical class and I'm not
>> sure for what gain (but losing the freemod semantics and sytanx).
>
> My point is that "na hu" (which would have to be pronounced "na,hu"
> is *already legal* and means the same thing as "nahu". That being so,
> special-casing "nahu" isn't that useful.

If both are legal, then

Inahu
I,nahu
Ina,hu
I,na,hu

are all distinct, aren't they?

[selpa'i]

la Randal, ga cutse le nedfui:

> It is true that if one wanted the parser to read na hu rather than nahu, you
> would need to put a comma into it. The two phrases mean the same thing.
> If there is a merit to the present situation, it lies in being able to
> express ourselves more subtly by using the freedom of placement of a
> freemod. I await interesting examples from selpa'i.

(1) Moihu tu tokna le kupta
"Why did you take the cup?"

(2) Tu moihu tokna le kupta
"Why did *you* take the cup?"

(3) Tu tokna moihu le kupta
"Why did you *take* the cup?"

(4) Tu tokna le kupta moihu
"Why did you take the *cup*?"

I'm not sure why I have to show these, since they work just like any
other freemod, and we already know how those are useful, don't we? You
can replace "moihu" with "ao" in (1) through (4) and the sentences would
still make sense and be useful in exactly the same way, except nobody
would disagree then.

--hue la Selpahi

[selpa'i]

Mi pa cutse le nedfui:

>
> (1) Moihu tu tokna le kupta
> "Why did you take the cup?"
>
> (2) Tu moihu tokna le kupta
> "Why did *you* take the cup?"
>
> (3) Tu tokna moihu le kupta
> "Why did you *take* the cup?"
>
> (4) Tu tokna le kupta moihu
> "Why did you take the *cup*?"

(5) Tu slano moihu kapcko le darto
"Why did you open the door *slowly*?"

(6) Tu fa duohu gancu
"How *will* you win?"

It might even be worth considering placing *all* relative operators +
any argument into the freemod class, though I'm not proposing that at
this moment.

--hue la Selpahi

[Randall Holmes]

Yes, I see the point selpa'i is making.

Im  quite sure we dont want to put relative clauses in general in freemod,

but selpa'i is showing actual reasons why it is handy to be able to place these interrogatives freely. 

But notice my suggestion that we might be able to put relative clauses

into je/jue links (independently of whether we move nahu out of freemod), which would have

some of the same effects.

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Randall Holmes <m.randal...@gmail.com> wrote:

Some of those are different anyway.

Ina, hu   can be the opening of a sentence which has a quite different structure.

I've shown examples recently of APA words leading to genuine structure word breaks.

Nothing about John's proposal reduces this multiplicity.

In any case, I actually see selpa'i's point -- there are genuine things one can

do with a freemod that one cannot do with a PA modifier phrase.

Ti blanu kouhu bakso

This is a blue (how?) box

in which we are asking specifically how it is *blue*

Of course, a solution to this might be to contemplate how we could bind

a PA phrase in such a context.  Is there any particular reason that

Je and JUE couldn't take term instead of argument?  This would allow

modifiers as well as arguments to bind very tightly to predicates...

It would then be grammatical to say

blanu je na hu bakso

I suspect John might have an informed opinion on this...

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[Randall Holmes]

I don't have time now, but I think Im working on a serious proposal to change

jelink to je term and juelink to jue term

It looks harmless grammatically and it has clear uses.  One thing it does do

is preserve the freedom of expression selpa'i is talking about even if we

adopt John's proposal re nahu.  But I think it has lots of other uses.

[John Cowan]

Randall Holmes scripsit:

> Ti blanu kouhu bakso
>
> This is a blue (how?) box
>
> in which we are asking specifically how it is *blue*

That sort of works, but it doesn't work IMO for "where" or "when".
But the work done in English by contrastive stress (per selpahi's
examples) can't in the general case be handled by these freemods,
because contrastive stress works in sentences, not just questions.
I'd rather see a specific contrastive-stress freemod. Of course, in
many languages stress doesn't do this job, cleft sentences do ("It is
John who goes to the store" vs. "It is the store that John goes to", e.g.)

> Of course, a solution to this might be to contemplate how we could
> bind a PA phrase in such a context. Is there any particular reason
> that Je and JUE couldn't take term instead of argument?

They should, and I actually didn't notice that they currently don't.
(In Lojban they do.)

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[Randall Holmes]

Some of those are different anyway.

Ina, hu   can be the opening of a sentence which has a quite different structure.

I've shown examples recently of APA words leading to genuine structure word breaks.

Nothing about John's proposal reduces this multiplicity.

In any case, I actually see selpa'i's point -- there are genuine things one can

do with a freemod that one cannot do with a PA modifier phrase.

Ti blanu kouhu bakso

This is a blue (how?) box

in which we are asking specifically how it is *blue*

Of course, a solution to this might be to contemplate how we could bind

a PA phrase in such a context.  Is there any particular reason that

Je and JUE couldn't take term instead of argument?  This would allow

modifiers as well as arguments to bind very tightly to predicates...

It would then be grammatical to say

blanu je na hu bakso

I suspect John might have an informed opinion on this...

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 5:12 AM, selpa'i <sel...@gmx.de> wrote:

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[Randall Holmes]

They don't.  They shortly will, in my parser.  I can see that it is an easy theorem that this will not cause ambiguities.  And I will write a proposal.

This allows one to say things like

le mrenu je vi la hasfa

The man who is at the house

le bilti je vi lo cutri, nirli (the beautiful-in-the-water girl)