Message-Id: <m0sB2hW-0009acC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Mon, 15 May 1995 12:07:42 -0400
Reply-To:     Dylan Thurston <dpt@MATH.HARVARD.EDU>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         Dylan Thurston <dpt@MATH.HARVARD.EDU>
Subject:      A modest proposal #2: verdicality
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 2127
Lines: 43

{ga'inai loi satcyselsku zo'u stidi}
[The attitudinal paper mentions {galtu} w.r.t ga'i, which seems
malglico.  {tolbanli}, maybe?]
[I'd like to stick in a tense for "prematurely", but I couldn't find
one.  Why isn't there a distinction: natural beginning vs. real
beginning?]

If I understand correctly, the usage of {le broda} as "that which I
choose to say brodas" was introduced to mimic [with reason] a feature
of natlangs: one can say "the cat in the painting", even though that
cat is not, strictly speaking a cat, but only an image of a cat.

There is a looseness here (clearly necessary for succinct
communication).  Lojban analyses it as being a looseness in the
description.  I'd like to argue that, instead, it's a looseness in the
predication "cat".

Consider another example: a painting of a man walking across a field.
How would one express the English sentence
        The man is carrying a heavy load.
in Lojban?  The man is not a man, but that is covered by the use of
{le ninmu}; but neither is he carrying anything.  The appropriate
Lojban gismu, {bevri}, requires a source, destination and route and
hence movement (IMHO anomalously, but that's another issue), of which
there is none in the static painting.

But this is just the ordinary loose way of speaking, expressed in
Lojban by the cnima'o {sa'enai}.  Just because Lojban is intended to
be a logical language doesn't mean that speakers have to be
pedantically strict (unless, of course, they say so, with {sa'e}).

So I'd like to see some justification for why the verdical/non-verdial
distinction must be made with every reference to {le/lo toldi}.  Other
distinctions make sense: the difference indivual/mass/set/ideal affects
the semantics of the rest of the sentence (though I don't understand the
difference between mass and set yet), and it's clearly necessary to make
the distinction between quantified (existential) and specific references.
But I don't see why +/-verdical distinction has to be there when it can
just as easily be made with a cnima'o following the brivla.

If this has been discussed before, my apologies.

c'o mi'e. dilyn.