View source for Frank likes Betty more than Mary

{{se inspekte/en}}Continuation of [['''pe''' necessary for "sumti plus (BAI-type modifier)" (gotcha)]].
[[CLL|Refgram]]:
{{mu|la frank cu nelci la betis ne semau la meiris}}
{{mu|la frank cu nelci la meiris ne seme'a la betis}}
*xod:
*:I avoid '''semau''' and '''seme'a''' because I find their reversed meanings a little clumsly. So far I have been able to use '''zmadu''' as a main selbri and as a tanru or lujvo piece, and never had to deal with those 2 modals.
**I don't think that there's a question that all uses of '''mau''' and '''me'a''' can be paraphrased with '''zmadu''' or '''mleca''' as the main selbri, but often it gives constructions whose main selbri is very different from the conceptually most significant selbri.
***[[User:Nick Nicholas|nitcion]]:
***:True. Still, it's my impression most Lojbanists do avoid it, because of its whiff of '''ka malrarbau''' (see below.)
*[[Jay Kominek|Jay]]:
*:Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, or i'm simply naive, but what is wrong with '''la frank cu nelci la meris noi zmadu la betis'''?
**The answer is, as you'd expect, a question: '''zmadu fi ma?''' But back when this kind of calque was being come up with (ca. 1990), [[ce'u|ce'u]] was not even a twinkle in [[Adam Raizen|Adam Raizen]]'s eye. :-) Our modern technology allows:
{{mu|la frank cu nelci la betis noi zmadu la meris loni la frank cu nelci ce'u}}
And of course, you can just cut out the middleman and end up with
{{mu|la betis cu zmadu la meris loni la frank cu nelci ce'u}}
*[[User:Nick Nicholas|nitcion]]:
*:Which is so forehead-slappingly better, you've gotta wonder why it's taken so long for anyone to realize it...
**[[Jay Kominek|Jay]]:
**:maybe it just needed some sleep-deprivation to inspire it? (or have you already relocated to '''.au''' such that you've been in a same time zone for the past few hours while this exchange occurred?) Guilty as charged! And it's not like I haven't got the etymology of Boosalis to be researching... (For the record: 5:57 AM Pacific Time, 6:57 AM Mountain Time)
*[[User:Nick Nicholas|nitcion]]:
*:Clarification: Lojbab protests that I had said pretty much that, without the '''ce'u''', in 1992. Not the point: back then, we didn't have '''ce'u''', to disambiguate who was less than who, which is why the '''nemau'''-construction exists in the first place. So I what I said back then using '''loni''' was a context-dependent mess.
*:'''la frank cu nelci la meris noi zmadu la betis''' is the type of sentence which inspires using '''zmanei''' for ''prefer''.
*Also try: '''la frank nelci la betis [[xe'e|xe'e]] semau la meiris'''
* '''.i zo mau zo'u rarbausmi jume'abo sarcu'''