Re: TECH: nested bridi anaphora

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

This is a known hole in the language, but alas is not so easily solved.
I gather from quick reading that you are proposing counting and
subscripting like ri, which I think everyone agrees is a pain in the
behind and not really practical at normal speech speeds, even if you CAN
agree how to count.  It is also somewhat redundant to go'i, which is
also a ri-like counter, but which skips sub-bridi.

It is fairly easy to come up with a sentence that makes ri type counting
unbearably hard (not to mention leaving open the question of whether
bridi in descriptions shouldn't be counted too - you might have wanted
to say the equivalent of "I am the dog, and I can see you").  But better
and more common examples are those in which there are multiple levels of
abstractions in one sumti (two levels seems to happen a lot), extra
bridi stuck in through relative clauses (which may in turn have
abstractions), etc.

We realized early on that there was no scheme that could handle all the
strange cases, and still be usable for the easy cases.  Indeed even
within sumti we have uncountable values:  other sumti within the current
sumti of the main bridi are not counted in "ri" reference.  It is easy
to come up with situations where they are useful - take any bridi with a
ri expressed, and put it in an abstraction sumti, and the "ri" refers to
the first sumti before the abstraction sumti and not to the other place
within the abstraction

(i.e. la djan. nelci lenu le mlatu cu tancysatre ri says that John likes
the cat to lick _him_, as opposed to the cat itself)

That is why the little-used lerfu anaphora may be a better long-term
solution, especially for complex cases.  There will be times when
ri/ra/ru will be very clear, other times when vo'a/vo'e will work, and
ke'a seems to work very nicely in its limited domain.  But lerfu are
better than ko'a in that they needn't be assigned to refer, provided
that there is only one plausible sumti starting with the appropriate
letter.  (The tradeoff is that they have lower redundancy - ty and py
could be easily confused.  But I guess you could use "anyword bu" to
solve that one.)

Turning back to the bridi problem, I never saw go'i and family as being
even as powerful as the set of sumti anaphora.  I put in what became
no'a patterned after ke'a, for use in relative clauses.  I can't recall
when "nei" came in, but it is recent (since 6/90, when "nei" was freed
as a selma'o related to lerfu) and the definition right now is murky -
is it the main bridi of the current sentence (as I thought, since I
vaguely recall a cmavo patterning after vo'a-series) or the sub-bridi
that you are working in right now.  John can probably clarify when it is
supposed to be used in his concept (it doesn't matter too much - one is
no'ixino and the other no'ixiro, but we oughta figure out which is most
useful or get rid of it).

But given that go'i itself is not powerful enough to handle all cases, I
am inclined to go to our systems of anaphora that are more like ko'a and
lerfu.  The equivalent of ko'a are the brodX series, which presumably
should be assigned with "cei".  We have no obvious equivalent to lerfu,
though it seems that you could use brodaxiBY to get the point across.

But all of this seems a waste.  Why, in the examples you present, not
just use ellipsized viska and zerle'a, both of which are the same or
fewer syllables as the cmavo solutions you propose?

I'm having trouble seeing a pattern of situations that a new cmavo would
handle where the result would be consistently shorter than the typical
repeating of the referent.  Maybe when the language has a lot of 8
syllable brivla this will seem more useful, but I suspect that such
restricted brivla might often be anaphorized by using the gismu in the
final position as an abbreviation, and you always have subscripted broda
to fall back on.

(A series of nonsense gismu starting with each consonant sounds
interesting, too, as an analogue to the lerfu anaphora - but I don't see
proposing it unless we find usage demanding it.)

I see this "hole" in the language as being of a different order than the
"missing demonstratives", which can only be approximated by other
wordings.

lojbab