From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Thu Feb 13 18:02:29 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Thu, 13 Feb 92 18:02 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA21300; Thu, 13 Feb 92 17:59:20 EST Received: from cunixf.cc.columbia.edu by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA10735; Thu, 13 Feb 92 16:13:39 -0500 Received: from cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu by cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (5.59/FCB) id AA29444; Thu, 13 Feb 92 16:13:35 EST Message-Id: <9202132113.AA29444@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.1) with BSMTP id 7537; Thu, 13 Feb 92 16:12:12 EST Received: by CUVMB (Mailer R2.07) id 4290; Thu, 13 Feb 92 16:11:33 EST Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1992 14:14:26 EST Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Subject: Re: restrictive modification of names X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: <9202122015.AA29312@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>; from "And Rosta" at Feb 12, 92 8:09 pm Status: RO la and. rost. cusku di'e > If this is so, then a cmene is a one place predicate meaning "x1 is called > [cmene]". I think this overstates the case, but has a measure of truth in it. I believe a more accurate statement would be that names only appear in Lojban in implicit quotation marks. In my interlinear translations, "la" is usually not glossed: la .and. brito And is-British. But if I were to gloss "la", I would gloss it thus: la .and. brito At-least-one-of-those-called "And" is-British. So we see that ".and." in "la .and." is a mention rather than a use, and the effect of "la" is to convert from mention to use. The other use of names, of course, is vocative: coi .and. greetings-to-the-one-called "And". Here again, the name is effectively in quotation marks until dereferenced; indeed "coi .and." and "coi la .and." are synonymous. > John cowan's characteristically perspicuous posting on this matter > confirms the above. Thank you, and not least for the word "perspicuous", which no one I know ever uses, save me. > Now why I posted my original query is that in English names do not > work like this. Normal words usually have a sense: the sense of > _cat_ is the prototypical cat, or the category of cats, or whatever > you want to call it. The referent of some instance of the word > _cat_ (i.e. the word when used) is an instance of the prototypical > cat (or a member of the cat category, etc.). Names, though, are > different: they don't have senses. They have specific referents > independently from any context. So whereas a dictionary would under > the entry for _cat_ make no mention of any particular cat as the > meaning of the word, under an entry for _Bob LeChevalier_ it > would say not "entity called Bob LeChevalier" but "prominent > figure in Loglan movement, born 1950s, married, lives Boston" etc. Washington, but no matter. > If Lojban doesn't have names like English does, it leads to > an interesting situation. _La bob_ doesn't mean "entity named > bob" because there aren't any names. Rather, it means "entity > belonging to a category denoted by the word _bob_, having unpredictable > membership". The category "bob" is an extensionally defined set. > So when we meet someone for the first time, we should ask not > "What is your name" but "which 'LA set' do you belong to", where > 'LA set' is a term covering all categories introduced by > the word _la_, _lai_, etc. When we speak in Lojban, that's essentially what we do. do se cmene ma you are-named what? zo djan. "John". The word "cmene" after all is a predicate, relating a thing (the x1) to a word (the x2). From the Lojban point of view, then, "cmene" means "is the name of", or in your terminology "denotes the LA-set whose member is". -- cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban