Return-Path: From: cbmvax!uunet!PRC.Unisys.COM!dave Message-Id: <9107221427.AA01746@gem.PRC.Unisys.COM> Date: Mon, 22 Jul 91 10:32:36 EDT To: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan Cc: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Fri, 19 Jul 91 11:16:07 EDT Subject: Re: response to art protin on 'nu' Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Mon Jul 22 12:34:13 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!PRC.Unisys.COM!dave > Now, people, anyone want to try to explain how these four subclasses of events > apply to the event of sleeping, generally spoken as "nu sipna". True, we > USUALLY think of sleeping as a state - but Lojban frees you from that > constraint allowing you to think of sleeping as an activity or a process. Certainly the normal interpretation of sleeping is as a state. Wakefulness is also a state. "Waking up" is a state transition. Lojban may "free" you from these interpretations, but they are nonetheless the most "correct" categorization, and the default Lojban usage should be to treat sleep as a state. This is not to say that other usages should be discouraged; they should be used to emphasize different aspects of "sleeping," and avoided when emphasis is not intended. In this context, "achievement" does not refer to a laudable victory, but merely to the culmination of an activity. (I mention this in case any reader is not familiar with the Aristotelian categorization of events.) To "achieve" sleep is the end result of the process of falling asleep. I might say, for example, that at midnight I was in the process of falling asleep; at 12:27 I achieved sleep; at 12:45 I was in the sleep state. Note that the process here was that of falling asleep; I think it makes little sense to speak of the process of sleeping, unless one is discussing research into the stages of sleep, or the like. If sleeping IS spoken of as a process, I would have to guess that it was being used in the sense of recuperating; that is, as an (extended) transition from fatigued to refreshed. The only reason that occurs to me to treat sleep as an activity is for consistency with a question that presupposes an activity. "What is John doing?" "He is sleeping." However, the main reasons for answering in this way would appear to be (1) courtesy, i.e. not contradicting the questioner, ("He's not doing anything, he's asleep.") and (2) using the parallelism to indicate syntactically that the question is being responded to, rather than ignored in favor of another topic ("He's asleep." has the wrong syntactic form for a response to this question.) BTW, Lojban is to be lauded for providing general mechanisms to distinguish these categories. General mechanisms are usually preferable to special constructions. However, at least in this case, Lojban does not "free" the English-speaking user from any constraints, since English fully supports discussion of the process of falling asleep, the achievement of sleep, and the state of sleep, as I have done in the paragraph above that refers to clock times. English does not readily support the "activity of sleeping", but as this strikes me as somewhat nonsensical anyway, I feel that in this case English wins over Lojban by virtue of making it harder to talk nonsense in English. (Oooh, I can feel the flames already!) If someone wishes to take me to task for this statement, please realize that I have already considered the possibility that my evaluation is mere cultural bias, brought about by the fact that my native language is English--and I'm not convinced. -- Dave Matuszek (dave@prc.unisys.com) I don't speak for my employer. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Flon's Axiom: | | "There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming | | language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs." | -------------------------------------------------------------------------