From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Tue Oct 22 02:57:19 1991 Return-Path: Date: Tue Oct 22 02:57:19 1991 Message-Id: <9110212049.AA26006@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc Sender: Lojban list From: cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc Subject: Re: Place structures X-To: lojban@cuvmb.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 21 Oct 91 09:21:00 EDT." <9110211322.AA21151@julia.math.ucla.edu> Status: RO The L.A. group had an addition to this thread concerning the idea that each selbri includes all modal places. Pete Thomas said, suppose you express "f = ma"; this physical rule applies for all time everywhere in the universe. Thus the tense on it is not just irrelevant, but is wrong. "pa zo'e va zo'e" must not be assumed on that statement. Playing devil's advocate, I pointed out that only a few hundred years ago it would have been "obvious" that different physical laws applied in the heavens and in the Earth; thus the tense would have been mandatory. We reached a compromise, that modernly zo'e represents "every 4-D point in the universe in extension", which the speaker could have said but didn't; ancient speakers might have omitted a more limited range of applicability. zo'e can be a lot more polymorphic than a naked "da". So maybe in the 24th century, charm and flavor tenses will be as important as time and space tenses are to us. It makes sense to serve only the most obvious and common places of the relation by numbered places, and to handle the rest with , as is done with tenses. That policy allows for easy expansion, and also makes words a lot easier to learn, and to make compounds from. This feeds into Lojbab's idea of "indefinitely many BAI's" in place of "all BAI's" being part of the relation: the user will have a specific selection (not indefinite, not all) of BAI's that are essential extra places, but as the culture or the user's understanding changes the selection of BAI's will also change. Now for prescription: in this view, it's a rather poor policy if the dictionary fails to give any guidance about essential BAI's -- but it is understood that the dictionary list is simply to get people started, and should be revised (as natural language dictionaries are) to reflect current usage. AI listeners, as well as humans, will have to deal with speakers whose BAI list differs from what the listener is using, gotten from the latest version of the dictionary. -- jimc