From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Mar 05 2002 - 10:37:17 MST
> (hal@finney.org <hal@finney.org>):
> Harvey writes:
> > 1 think 2 are taking 3 comments out of context. No 5 would take 6 so far.
>
> This reminds me of Loglan's version of pronouns, when I was learning it 20
> years ago. They used da, de, di, do, and du, which were kind of like 1,
> 2, 3, 4, 5. Da was the most recently named noun, de was the 2nd most
> recently named, and so on. So if you had "The AI told John that his
> sister had left her wallet at the store," the store would be da, the
> wallet de, the sister di, John do and the AI du. So you could follow
> it with "Du also said do should go to da and get de." You would soon
> learn to subconsciously associate the right pronoun with the right noun,
> the designers hoped.
Mordern Lojban (and the latest TLI Loglan as well, I think) went a
little crazy here. They have several sets of "pronouns" (scare quotes
because "noun" as such isn't really a Lojban concept). The anaphora are
more or less as you say, although in Lojban they're a bit more flexible:
"ra" is "that thing I just mentioned", "ri" is "that thing I mentioned a
little further back", and "ru" is "that thing I mentioned a while ago".
There is also the "ta" set, which are demonstrative: "that person or thing";
the "da" set which is existential: "there exists a person or thing";
the "ko'a" set which are explicitly bound variables; a few standard
shortcuts like "mi" (I, me) and "do" (you); and the convention that any
single letter used as a pronoun is treated as a "ko'a" implicitly bound to
something that begins with that letter. And all of these can take numeric
subscripts to further clarify: "That(1) contains that(2)".
In all of these sets, not only is there no gender-specificity, but
there are no pronouns that distinguish people and things. "Ta barda"
means "That is large", and could mean a person, a dog, or a house.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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