From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Thu Mar 12 23:13:31 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Thu, 12 Mar 92 23:13 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA23542; Thu, 12 Mar 92 23:11:54 EST Received: from pucc.Princeton.EDU by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA15338; Thu, 12 Mar 92 22:32:29 -0500 Message-Id: <9203130332.AA15338@relay1.UU.NET> Received: from PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU by pucc.Princeton.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 9895; Thu, 12 Mar 92 22:32:00 EST Received: by PUCC (Mailer R2.08 PTF011) id 1542; Thu, 12 Mar 92 22:31:48 EST Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1992 13:30:12 +1000 Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU!nsn Sender: Lojban list From: cbmvax!uunet!MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU!nsn Subject: Re: Lojban Names. X-To: jbdp@cix.compulink.co.uk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 11 Mar 92 19:23:00 GMT." Status: RO Saluton, Julian, kaj dankon pro viaj komentoj. I don't know quite how I'm going to atone for the {ka juxre} (clumsiness) of my country-naming postings, but suggestions, conceivably involving flagellation, are welcome :) As I already mentioned privately to Ivan, only to find Mark simultaneously saying so to the list, zoi. zy. Original name zy. goi (lojbanisation) is the only real solution to this issue. The dictionary, if anything, will propose conventional, but to my mind not obligatory, lojbanisations. Was it you, Julian, who was asking what clefts were two months ago? OK, here's the story. In syntactic analysis of sentences, one can often speak of a sentence being embedded within another. Thus: "I saw that he was drowning" is analysed (in TGish terms; go easy on me, I've just started studying these things methodically) as: ((I)(see (he drowns))), where "he drowns" is an independent sentence. Now often in such anaylsis, what you seem to find is that there's an embedded sentence, alright, but bits of it are scattered in the sentence. "He is drowning" "HE seems to BE DROWNING" The analysis is: ((he is drowning) (seems)), where "seems" is a verb taking the sentence "he is drowning" as a subject. Compare "It seems that HE IS DROWNING" In the first case, the sentence was split up, the subject ("HE") going before "seems", the verb phrase ("IS DROWNING"), modified and appearing after the phrase. This split is called clefting. In the second case, the subject and predicate of the embedded clause are together. It's not clefted. Now, a, shall we say, literal-minded analysis of "seems" would give the lojban "x1 seems to be lenu x1 does x2". This is in fact still the status quo: {mi simlu lenu mi co'a djacu morsi}. It can be argued that such a set up is bad. For example, it is redundant: The {mi} in x1 reappears (even if usually elided) in the x2 clause. When LLG agrees that such a clefted place structure is redundant, it puts x2 where x1 used to be. This happened with rinka. x1 causes x2 to be x3 by doing x4. Well, in lojban, x4 will be {lenu x1 co'e}, and x3 will be {lenu x2 co'e}. So x1 and x2 are redundant, and we're left with the current structure, event x1 causes event x2 to happen. "I cause you to blush by flattering you" "The event that I flatter you causes the event that you blush" This is simpler in Lojban than a stream of sumti, but it's not always convenient. Thus, {le rinka} is now "a cause"; it is hard to speak now about "a causer". {jaigau} does the trick, but I feel it fails on other grounds (it can't do something similar to unclefted x2s). And of course, not all place structures are uncleftable. Consider {trina}: x1 attracts x2 by doing x3. Uncleft it: "The fact that x1 happens attracts x2." Doesn't mean the same, does it. Now try this: Gork attracts Dork by talking to Mork (oh, how talkative it is!) Mork attracts Dork by being talked to be Gork (oh, what a good listener it is!) In unclefted garb: Gork's talking to Mork attracts Dork Mork's being talked to by Gork attracts Dork I don't know if it's obvious in English, but these two sentences cannot mean different things in Lojban. Thus {trina} can not be unclefted. Thus unclefting, which, if you think about it, can lead you to quite unnatural ways of speaking, is justifiably a major issue in Lojban design. Hope this made sense. Nick, whose green star isn't getting that much use at the moment. Neither would my Lojban Necker Cube. Hey, what *is* a Necker Cube? (Jamie Bechtel proposed it as a Lojban logo once. Whatever happened to him?)