Message-Id: <199310070636.AA20653@eli.CS.YALE.EDU>
Date:         Thu, 7 Oct 1993 02:34:28 -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

Cowan writes:

In sum, I am becoming more and more convinced that the whole idea of
"deleting a place because it's irrelevant to the [English or other NL]
concept" is the most stinking of red-herrings.  We should remove only places
that clearly overlap other places or that are implicitly filled by other
lujvo members taken as events (in belenu-lujvo, e.g.).


I respond:

Ah, but a lujvo isn't really supposed to correspond to an English or other
NL concept.  It corresponds to some conceptual relationship between a
collection of objects/ideas/sumti whose components are in turn other Lojba
n
words/ideas.  If in thinking a certain Lojban thought you do not perceive
a relevant relation with a sumti of semantics x-sub-n, you should be able
to omit that place from the place structure of the lujvo you are coining
to express that relationship AT THE TIME OF COINING IT.  Because once that
sumti is present in the place structure, it is a veridical part of the
relationship being claimed, and that means that there MUST be a zo'e th
at
makes it true.

Omitting a place makes for a broader, more abstrac
t, concept.  I would contend
that doing any exercise in place-strucutre composition that resembles what
Nick has been proposing means that you will consider whether your concept
has certain places when you are choosing the concept.  If your concept truly
doesn't include something in the relationship, you should be able to leave it
out.

The problem in communication, of course, is that someone else who doesn't know t

that youy are omitting a place, may presume it is present (with a value of "zo'e
\"zo'e" even if you haven't stated a value for it.  If lujvo place structures a
re
assumed to be "fat" for the most part, this will be the normal assumption,
and you will have to get very long-winded in order to express more abstract
and general concepts.  This in spite of the fact that we seem to have biased
the gismu list, for example, to have words/place strutures with fewer sumti
in their structures, and hence a greater abstraction level than corresponding
English/NL words.  Why should lujvo be hyper-concrete when gismu are rather
hyper-abstract?  And how do express the more abstract concepts when they truly
are what you are intending (likely in poetry, analogy, and other intellectual
endeavors)?

Moreover, when you now have these overspecified place structured lujvo, say,
for a 2-part lujvo, and you wish to combine 2 of these lujvo in a metaphor
to form a new lujvo-expressed concept, think of how many places you will
have!  Assuming rather minimal deletion, 2 4place gismu will probably form
a 6or 7 place lujvo.  Two of these will form a 10 or 12 place lujvo with
4 terms, most of which are NOT going to be relevant to any particular
expression of the rtelationship expressed by the lujvo.  At this point these
possibly relevant related concepts probably are no longer "metaphysically
necessary" in the same sense we intend when we included the places in the
gismu that comprise the lujvo.  This because not only do we not have a value
in mind for the place in question, but if challenged, we might indeed agree
that the relationship we DID have in mind might NOT require some value for
the omitted place.  A dog-house-builder MIGHT build houses for a paritcular
breed, but if he is just building generic doghouses, the breed place is
truly NOT part of the concept.

I thus reiterate that I think that lujvo should be relatively lea
n and
broad/abstract in their simplest/shortest form, just as the gismu are, and
more specific, and having more places, through adding more terms.
Yet we must kkep concepts within the  comprehension of the people that think tm.
  I have heard it said that the human mind may be incapable of grasping
more than 7 concepts at a time - I have always assumed this to mean that
it is highly undesirable to have a predicate with more than 6 or 7 sumti
(plus the predicate concpet itself), and even fewer if one or more of the sumti
is usually abstract (hence often being comprised of more sumti/selbri within
itself).

Thus I have tended to, for example, accept people's arguments for eliminating
places broadly from the gismu list (few gismu have an observer place, fewer
still have a time or location place which can otherwise be added elxplicitly
through tenses or BAI tags or their relatives, and we even avoid "under
conditions" and "by standards" places except for the latter when we are
dealing with a cocept that is inherently subsjective or mental.

I would like to see the lujvo be similarly respectful of the minds of the people
who will try to think about rhe concepts being expressed.

lojbab