History: grappling with sumti sequencing

Source of version: 3 (current)

Long ago in my salad days when I had not yet turned a tired and desiccated brown in judgement, I drew up for my own use a table showing how to rearrange places using SE, exactly of the sort given at ((Rearranging arguments without using FA)). I even used ''setese'' and its ilk. As far as I recall, nobody had the patience to work out what I was saying, and I could never be bothered to learn the table. * ''For the record, this was done for Loglan 20 years ago or so. If we had access to those files, we would only need translation. As here, the Loglan decision was that the system was too messy to use.'' selma'o SE itself is indispensible: there is no way to say {le ve broda} without using SE (except for ''le poi'i broda fo ke'a'' -- and the price of that is you're using an experimental cmavo. But I have problems using SE. ''se'' itself is not too bad: the order 21345 feels natural to me. But I generally want 31235, 41235, 51234 much more often than the 32145, 42315, 52341 that ''te'', ''ve'', ''xe'' give you, and the SE-combos to get those orders are mindboggling -- for me, at least, they'd have to be learnt by rote as essentially noncompositional gestalts. And that's a Bad Thing. * I decided to check how to do 51234 with SE. It turns out to be ''xe ve te se''. I had to use the Search function to find it! * actually ''xese broda'' (51342) is shorter...In fact: ***(Was Footnote: Fair enough, but 51342 overtaxes my brain. I can cope with any ordering of FA-tagged sumti, but for untagged sumti I need them to occur in canonical order, except for the sumti promoted by SE.) ** to get 31 = ''te se broda'' (312) ** to get 41 = ''ve se broda'' (4132) ** to get 51 = ''xe se broda'' (51342). Notice a pattern? I figured this all out when i first started learning Lojban, but then never used it (AFAIK) in any of my writing! (''mi'e maikl.'') A further problem with using SE is that it fucks up the workings of FA. Suppose I want ordering 41, and for some reason or other need to get 4 first by using ''ve''. I can't remember the SE-combo for 41, so need to mark the 1 by FA. The problem is that ''fa'' is supposed to mark the x1 '''after''' SE-conversion, not before. So it's not enough that I know the place structure of the brivla. I also have to go through the computations of working out what position the ur x1 is. Yet another problem of FA/SE interactions is that without checking ((Woldy)) I can't remember whether ''fo ko'a ko'e broda'' yields 41 or 45 and whether ''broda fo ko'a ko'e'' yields 42 or 45. * ''For the record again, the items after the flagged sumti are in order from the flagged place: {fo ke'a ke'o} is {fo ke'a fi ke'o}'' * Do you mean ''fo ke'a '''fu''' ke'o''? The dialect that appeals to me works thus: * Use of SE is sparing. No more than one SE on a selbri. When SE is used, FA is used for all but the derived x1 (unless ''se'' is used, in which case FA needn't be used for the derived x2). * ''fa, fe, fi, fo, fu'' always tag the underlying x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, in the manner of ((foi'V)). ** '''Since {se broda} is offcially a new predicate, different from {broda}, it can be argued that there are NO underlying x1, etc. different from the surface x1. This seems like hairsplitting.''' * the presence of FA-tagged sumti does not affect the place assigned to sumti that aren't FA-tagged, except in that places identified by FA-tagging are not available to be identified by sequence. ** ''Does this mean that {broda fo a b c d} is {broda b c a d} or {broda - b a c}?'' ** I mean that the for-me most intuitive rule would be that {broda fo a b c d} identifies a b c d as x4, x2, x3, x5 respectively. {fo a b c d broda} would identify them as x4, x1, x2, x3. --And.