From melissa@fastanimals.com Fri Feb 27 13:19:32 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Fri, 27 Feb 2004 13:19:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from [216.127.72.21] (helo=www.simlifecycle.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1AwpON-0002wp-Lx for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Fri, 27 Feb 2004 13:19:31 -0800 Received: from localhost (melissa@localhost) by www.simlifecycle.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i1RKZov26055 for ; Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:35:50 -0600 Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:35:50 -0600 (CST) From: melissa@fastanimals.com X-X-Sender: melissa@www.simlifecycle.com To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: (no subject) In-Reply-To: <20040227201711.GE15105@miranda.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-archive-position: 535 X-Approved-By: melissa@fastanimals.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: melissa@fastanimals.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 jkominek@miranda.org wrote: > 'Sense' isn't an applicable concept at the syntactic level. Sure it is. It's possible to violate syntactic sense in natural languages. In keeping with the violence theme, for instance, "I die you" doesn't make syntactic sense because "die" doesn't take a direct object. These syntactically senseless sentences are possible in English and Spanish, and I seem to recall that they're possible in Swahili as well (although my Swahili is quite rusty). I suspect that they are possible in any natural language. Getting rid of such was one of the original goals for Loglan, according to some docs on the Loglan web site. I guess I just sort of assumed that Lojban had inherited that, since they are quite similar grammatically. > Someone could say, for instance, "I'm going to kill you, because > you're black." You and I consider that an entirely irrational > statement, but if a hardcore KKK member hears it, it'll be as rational > to him as the statement "Its raining, you should carry an umbrella" is > to us. In that case it is the semantics adding the irrationality. "I'm going to kill you, because you're dangerous" is essentially the same syntax, but would seem more reasonable to most people. The syntax isn't the problem with your example; it's more of an irrational *idea* than an irrational statement in the literal sense. -- mylisys XOLynswyrt mi tadni la lojban