Message-Id: <199502120021.AA17905@nfs2.digex.net>
From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Date: Sat Feb 11 19:21:08 1995
Subject:      Re: replies re. ka & mamta be ma
X-From-Space-Date: Sat Feb 11 19:21:08 1995
X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu

And:
> I think I get it. You're saying
>    -Ex NEC x belegs table
> whereas I was understanding
>    -NEC Ex x belegs table

Right.

> You said "every cmavo is not needed" meaning
>    Ax -NEC x is cmavo, -Ex NEC x is cmavo
> and I took it as
>    -NEC Ex x is cmavo

Right.

> Was I simply wrong, or was the Lojban ambiguous? (I said some cmavo
> aren't needed (Ex x is cmavo & -NEC x is cmavo) and you said that
> is true of all cmavo.)

No, you said {kau} is not needed, and I said that that is true of each
cmavo. Replace {kau} in what you said by any cmavo of your choice, and
that is true.

But even with your new formulation, if you replace Ex with Ax, it gives
what I said, not what you interpreted.

> Try this instead:
> "Most are unneeded" is false if less than most are needed.
> "It is not the case that most are needed" is false if most are needed.

Ok, they are different, but the difference is not that significant.

The first says that "a few (the complement of most) are needed".
The second that "None, a few, many but not most, or all are needed".

Pragmatically, saying the second to mean other than the first would be
very misleading. (As for the case of cmavo, I believe the first is false,
because not even a few are absolutely needed, and the second is true
only in that it accepts the possibility that none are needed.)

> > > Every lg needs a word/morpheme for "1", but doesn't need one
> > > word/morpheme for "7582342".
> > Needs?
> "Need" by some criterion whereby the language ought to approximately
> model cognition/world-view.

I don't understand. How do you determine using that criterion, whether
for example pronouns are needed or not? Does a language without a word
for "zero" approximately model cognition/world view or not? Whose
cognition/world view? Is there a universal human one?

You are going from an absolutist "need", where a word for "1" is
obviously not essential, to something very fuzzy, where it is just as
arguable that a word like "kau" is needed.

> That's usually implicit in the design of
> invented lgs. I find it reasonable to claim that we readily conceptualize
> "1", but not "7583342", & a language shd in part reflect this somehow.

I totally agree that a word for "1" would be most useful in any language,
but I don't understand what objective criteria would require there to be
a word for "1" at the same time rejecting a word like "kau".

> > > > There are many ways of expressing the same idea. That holds for every
> > > > language, including Lojban.
> > > And so it follows by my reasoning that you cd get away with having
> > > only one way.
> > How does that follow?
> There are many ways I can light my cigarette. A petrol lighter, matches,
> the stove... I could get away with using only one of them.

Certainly, but how could you get away with making all other ways
impossible? My point is that once you have a language capable of expressing
human thought, a fortiori you have a language where every idea can be
expressed in a very large variety of ways. You are saying that in principle
you can restrict the "words/grammar" of the language in such a way that
each idea can only be expressed in one single way. If you are not saying
that, then how do you define the "minimal" set of cmavo/rules that your
grammar requires?

> > In fact, I doubt that you could device a language
> > for standard human comunication in which each idea can be expressed in
> > a unique single way.
> This is not the goal I've been speculating about. Rather, I've been
> speculating about minimizing the size of the grammar.

You could reduce the grammar to zero by having a different word for each
different idea. "a" would mean "Please, pass the salt", "aa" would mean
"Thank you", "aaa" would mean "It looks like we'll have rain tomorrow",
and so on. You would need a very large dictionary, but only a trivial
grammar. That wouldn't work for humans, but I'm not sure whether you are
imposing the condition that humans should be able to handle it. In some
cases you are happy to substitute simple "human" expressions with
unfathomable logical constructions.

> And I do think
> one could do without duplicating constructions of equivalent expressive
> power.

And I think you couldn't. Since neither of us can probably demonstrate
their thesis, I guess that's that.

> > > I guess some mathematician has worked out how few will
> > > suffice.
> > Two. It's called binary notation ;)
> Wdn't that just do positive integers?

With the decimal point and the minus sign you take care of all reals.
But you can find other tricks, like saying that the first digit is the
sign (0=+, 1=-) and all digits that follow alternate between the integer
and the fractional part (you'd have to start with the least significant
digit, though, so that -1000.01 would be written 10001001).
You need an infinite number of digits for the irrationals, but that is
true with any notation.

> > But then expressing ideas is not as simple as finding a notation for
> > numbers, nor is it simple (maybe impossible in some cases) to say when
> > two ideas are the same, which you need to do in order to check whether
> > you are duplicating some of them or not.
>
> Fortunately that's not the issue. Lexis & syntax is less slippery than
> semantics, and L & S are what I was hypothetically seeking to simplify.

Well, but you are mixing in semantics. Lojban syntax is trivial. Doing
away with {kau} doesn't simplify it, because {kau} is part of selmaho
UI, you'd have to get rid of the whole selmaho to affect the syntax of
the language. What you are saying is that there are other syntactic
structures with the same meaning as the ones using {kau}. But dismissing
{kau} does not change the syntax of the language. It only affects the
semantics.

Jorge