Re: cases

On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 11:54:01AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
> Lojban has the construction NP zo'u S, which creates a Mandarin-style
> topic-comment sentence.  For example, "le finpe zo'u citka" = "yu2 chi1",
> which doesn't say if the fish eats or is eaten.
Hmm, "yu2 chi1" would almost always be understood as "the fish eats" in
Mandarin. The passive particle "bei4" would be required to indicate
otherwise: "yu2 bei4 chi1".

>
> But you can also say NP zo'u tu'e (arbitrarily long text) tu'u, which makes
> the NP the "topic" of all the sentences in the text.
[snip]

Cool. Can you nest these things? My nominator sentence system currently
carries a context up to and *including* the subsequent nominator sentence,
which means you can "refine" the context if you so wish, after you've
talked about the more general overview. For example, you can start talking
about your friend's house (by "nominating" it with a sentence like "ni
epitru' d3 juli'r" -- "[The] house of Peter"), and then after you finish
talking about it, you can use a single word "my" in the locative case to
modify the context "Peter's house" to become "my house", and then carry on
about your house from there.

(Again, this isn't completely worked out yet, but the basic idea is that
the speaker can nest nominator sentences or tailor previous contexts to
describe the next context without having to re-state parts of the context
that hasn't changed.)


T