Message-Id: <199310081252.AA02793@eli.CS.YALE.EDU>
Date:         Fri, 8 Oct 1993 06:27:38 -0400
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: Lean Lujvo and fat gismu
To: Erik Rauch <rauch>
Status: RO

If differences in word meanings in English are due to differences in tense,
then there may indeed then be good reason for distinctions to be made
in some other way (i.e. the lexicon) in a language where tense is optional,
or unspecified.  And when the optional tense system is like Lojban's,
with strong perfectives (i.e. to talk about the beginning of something, we
implicitly decide whether or or not we are thinking about it as something
which will end or not - at least in choosing the tense), the distinctions
between leaving and starting to go somewhere specific, which journey has
an identifiable end, is real in the langauge.

Coupled with that, if there was such a value as "NULL" for a sumti, you
then have to decide whether it means the strog claim "there is no
value in this place that makes this true" (i.e. Lojban "noda") or it much
weaker claim that there may be some value, but it isn't relevant ("zi'o")
or it may be that there is definitely a value, but that it really isn't
important to me to specify it (though it might be logically important to
the claim of the sentence - the value is so implicit to the context that
specifying it is a waste of the communication channel ("zo'e" or sometimes
"zu'i").

Lojban has too many flavors of "NULL" to permit the sloppy English equivalent t
come across directly.

lojbab