Date: Wed, 14 Dec 1994 20:01:47 +0000
From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject: Q-kau
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To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Reply-to: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
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I said:
> Kau certainly seems glico to me, but I don't know about mabla.
> Kau works in virtually the same way as English interrogative pronouns
> that don't have the illocutionary force of questions.
> Does anyone have any idea how to render "indirect" interrogatives into
> predicate calculus? Wouldn't that settle the question of whether kau
> is malglico (or whether, instead, English is zabna logji)? [& into
> the bargain I would learn how to analyse English]
 
I begin with a stab at a prolegomenon to a basis of an answer to
my own question, and follow with replies to Djer & Lojbab.
 
I assume that if two unordered sets have exactly the same members then
they are the same set. In this case, knowing the identity of a set
amounts to knowing what its members are: if you can tell one set from
another, you can tell its membership from the membership of another set,
and vice versa.
  "I wonder who arrived":
     I wonder about the identity of the set of arrivers
  "I wonder how many arrived":
     I wonder about the identity of the set of cardinalities of
       the set of arrivers
  "I wonder whether they arrived":
     I wonder about the identity of the set of truthvalues of the
       proposition that they arrived
 
Next, I ask, how can we lojban this?
We can't replace "the identity of the set" by "lohi" alone, since sets
have additional properties to their identity. So "Mi djuno lohi klama"
could be compatible with "I know who drew diagrams of lohi klama".
"Lohi" alone is too vague.
 
The best I can do is "lo ka du lohi". So "I know who went" is
"Mi djuno lo ka du lohi klama". [Maybe I need "lo ka du ro lohi klama"?
I want "the set of all goers", not "every set of goers". Is "lohi ro"
what I want?]
 
Perhaps we can develop this into a more logically rigorous [- alas
not something I could lay claim to being] way of doing indirect
interrogatives in Lojban. Q-kau could either be dropped, or treated
as a possibly malglico and possibly abbreviatory locution inherited
from Lojban's less enlightened youth...
 
Djer:
> Well, I haven't really though this through, so it may be the blind
> leading the blind, but I can't resist And's interesting questions.
> The word list gives us an example, " I know WHO went to the store" as an
> appropriate usage for kau. "Who went to the store?" would be an
> interrogative use of who, but here I see it as a personal relative
> pronoun.
 
This may not be relevant, but I wouldn't call it a relative pronoun;
I would call it an interrogative pronoun. In "*I* know what YOU know"
"what" is a relative pronoun, while in "I KNOW what you KNOW" "what"
is an interrogative pronoun. I can muster arguments to support this,
but I won't unless you judge it germane.
 
> As such it could be written with the 'universal' relative
> pronoun, "such that", giving "I know something (x) such that it went
> to the store"  or mi djuno da zo'u da pa klama lo zarci.
 
[Is that really grammatical Lojban?]
 
"I know x such that x went to the store" is not a very good rendering of
the meaning. Better is "I know the identity of the goers to the store".
 
> Dropping into predicate calculus I get:
> E(a)E(x)E(y){ & person(x) & market(y) & went(x,y) & (a=I) & knows(I, x)}
> There is really nothing interrogative about this. It just claims x went
> to the market and I know x.
> Does this make any sense to you, And?
 
It does indeed. You're not getting the interrogative pronoun sense;
you're hitting the relative pronoun sense (like you get in "I drank
what you prepared for me", but NOT in "I wonder what you prepared
for me").
 
Lojbab:
> The "makau" style indirect 'questions' to her are really
> the same statement, but they falsely resemble questions in English (and
> maybe in other European languages)
 
It is my probably ignorant belief that the European 'indirect'
interrogatives are in fact less typologically unusual than the
conversion of these to function as relative pronouns.
 
> when what is really being done in "I
> know *who* went to the store" is ellipsis:  (mi djuno ledu'u zo'ekau
> klama le zarci).  There is no 'question' and it is unloglandic to think
> of it as a question.
 
If this is right, then surely "zohekau" is much to be preferred over
"makau". Let's see. Your example should english as:
   I know that it was %SOMEone that went to the shops
      [syntax is it-cleft, not relative clause]
   I know that who went to the shops was %SOMEone
      [% marks locus of intonational nuclear tone]
This is if zohe is bound by existential quantification over an
unrestricted category. Clearly this is entirely the wrong mraning.
 
What if zohe is +specific?
    I know that it was a certain %SOMEone that went to the shops
    I know that who went to the shops was a certain %SOMEone
That looks a bit more like it.
BUT:
(a) how can zohe be marked as +specific,
(b) will it generalize to other examples, e.g.
      "I wonder who went to the shops"
    I wonder about it being a certain %SOMEone that went to the shops
   ?I wonder about who went to the shops being a certain %SOMEone
      "We talked about who went to the shops"
    We talked about it being a certain %SOMEone that went to the shops
   ?We talked about who went to the shops being a certain %SOMEone
- it doesn't really work. The problem is that zohe is not +specific
in the mind of the speaker, but rather is +specific in the mind of
the 'knower' (the referent of one of the other sumtis).
 
So I reckon you're wrong.
 
> I may be reading more into her idea than she has ever actually said, but
> I think she would favor the Lojbanic way to be to supply the information
> rather than to make it a dangling 'question', which has a tantalizing
> hint of 'I know something you don't and I'm not going to tell you what
> it is'.
 
Well if you could change this to "a tantalizing hint of '***x1*** knows
something you don't'" we'd be nearer the mark.
 
------
And