Message-Id: <m0sRCvG-0000YlC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Wed, 28 Jun 1995 11:53:13 -0400
Reply-To:     Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      masses again
To:         lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
Content-Length: 12703
Lines: 267

And replies to me:
>>"A company" that paints my house, but has exactly one person as
>> an employee, seems quite discrete to me.  We don't think of the painting
>> company as a collection of porridgey arms and legs flailing paint
>> brushes (at least I don't %^).
>
>How, or why, is this a mass?

Because in all likelihood, you house is not being painted by "a
company", i.e. a business firm, but rather by people.  A company or firm
is one kind of mass view of a group of people (and generally some
physical objects or property as well).

"Chrysler" did not manufacture your car, except in a mass sense.  Rather
a group of workers on an assembly line did so.  The CEO of Chrysler, I
assure you, did not touch one rivet or bolt in your automobile.  And
most of the stockholders have never even seen a Chrysler factory.  If
you want, you can stretch to say that the factory made it, but if so,
then it was only THAT factory, and not the Chrysler plant in some other
locality that made the car.

We are attributing to the mass concept "Chrysler" the relevant
attributes of each of its employees and factories and stockholders.  We
then say that the mass individual makes your car.

What we don't do, in general, is look at an individual employee and
label him "Mr.  Chrysler".  On the other hand, we may drive past a
factory and say "That's Chrysler over there.", which strikes me as a
direct equivalent to the Trobriand Island Mr. Rabbit.

>> That is my take on Trobriand Island masses - that they are metonymic
>> rather than myopic singulars,
>
>I see the intuition, but if this metonymy is semanticized (i.e.
>grammaticalized) you have a problem of deciding whether it is the
>vehicle or the tenor of the metonym that is the referent - is the
>referent a mass of rabbits such that it is manifest by an ingredient of
>that mass?

Or ...?  I'm not sure what the alternatives being presented here are -
"vehicle" and "tenor" are rather murky to me %^)

If I understand your question, it parallels in my example above the
question "How do you know whether the label "Chrysler" is referring to
the individual or to the mass?"  And the answer is that the referent is
both simultaneously.  We CAN distinguish the specific component by
paraphrase if we need to, but generally don't.  I am not sure that
Trobriand Islanders even have a mechanism for talking about the
components of Mr. Rabbit distinct from the mass concept.

>> If you want true logical discourse, then phrase everything in prenexes
>> and daxitu'o.
>
>Maybe.  Lojban is supposed to be a logical language.  If only prenexes
>and da are logical, then only they should be used.  Certainly if I don't
>want transparently true logical discourse then I'll use English.

Lojban ENABLES logical discourse, and logical paradigms underly much of
the grammar.  This does not mean that everyone is required to talk only
in logical discourse.  The attitudinals alone guarantee that.

>> Some of the extra magic comes from the fact that you can say "zo'e
>> klama zo'e zo'e zo'e zo'e zo'e" and all the "zo'e"s are understood to be
>> evaluated independently,
>
>What does "evaluated independently" mean?

Meaning that the occurance of zo'e in any place of the sentence has no
semantic effect on the meaning of any other zo'e in the sentence; there
is no constraint that 2 zo'e refer to the same thing, nor is there a
requirement that they be different things.

>> and the fact that I used an x6 on klama poses no semantic problem.
>
>Why not?

To evaluate zo'e in x6, you need to know the context, which in this case
includes its relationship to the rest of the klama bridi.  If you don't
know its referent independent of context (implicit in the definition of
zo'e) and there is no way to infer that relationship from something in
the context (implicit in assigning an x6 to klama), zo'e is semantically
null, it is relating something unspecified in some unspecified way.

>> >> I guess a formal definition of a zo'e in the nth place of a predicate
>> >> broda is "le sexiny broda" or perhaps "da voi sexiny broda" if there is
>> >> any distinction from the previous, where "sexiny" is the conversion
>> >> operator (SE) for the nth place (yes it's legal to do that to SE).
>> >That sounds a bit daft to me, given the non-veridicality of le and
>> >voi.
>> Do you mean that you think that "zo'e" is veridical???  That sounds
>> *more than a bit* daft to me %^)
>
>{zoe klama} entails not merely {da voi klama} but also {da poi klama}.
>I am not merely describing zoe as a goer; I'm claiming that {da klama}.

le broda cu klama also entails the same things, but le broda is not
veridical.  I'm afraid I don't understand your use of the term
"veridical" in this context.

>> >All {pi} quantifers seem like
>> >nonsense to me. I've been following the recent discussion &
>> >have not spotted a good case for them.
>> They have a direct counterpart in English, with our mass concepts. e.g.
>> "I drank most of the water" "mi pinxe piso'e lei djacu" which I dare say
>> is not necessarily the same thing as saying "mi pinxe so'e le djacu".
>
>But it is the same as {mi pinxe pisoe le pa djacu}.

I think this is only the case because the x1 of djacu is already defined
to be a mass.

But
mi viska piso'o loi tarci
and
mi viska piso'o lo tarci

do not mean the same thing.  The latter says that you see a small part
of 1 star.

>Actually what I
>object to is (a) there being *default* fractionators, and (b)
>fractionators being restricted to lVi.

By default, we are stipulating what the implication is in the absence of
other context.  And in general, the default is minimally true in any
context.

Fractionators are not limited to lVi.  But when talking about
individuals, they talk about fractions (i.e. pieces) of those
individuals.

>But we haven't disagreed about {lo} since last year.  The debate is
>about what contribution to the logical form is made by quantifiers other
>than suho & ro.  We agree {lo} = {da poi}, gag at the redundancy though
>you might, so the debate over "quantifier+lo" applies equally to
>"quantifier+da".  And we seem to be reaching agreement in that debate,
>too.

No, we never agreed.  I think that people just got tired of arguing (or
simply overwhelmed by the volume, as Nora did); there has been
absolutely NO decisions made on any issue in the last year.  Not one!
And the one decision that I thought was made last LogFest, for lambda
variables, seems to be in question as well.  Until someone can put the
argument for change as succintly as has been done in the past, I am not
sure anyone can evaluate and decide the issues.

In particular, I object to any argument about quantifier + lo being
dependent on quantifier + da since I think that quantifiers were half of
the basis for claiming that they are the same.  If it turns out to be
useful to see quantifier + lo in a different way from quantifier + da,
then that in and of itself will prove a difference between lo and da.

>> I hope you understood that I meant "linguisitcs research" as it is
>> commonly understood in academia i.e., leading to peer-reviewed
>> publication, and scientific credibility.
>
>Well that's more a reflection of the absence of professional linguists
>from these discussions.  Myopic singulars, or maybe masses, made it into
>a talk I gave recently (as a solution to the problem of "Today is always
>hectic") - if I ever get round to taking it further there'll be Lojban
>to thank for the idea.

Write a paper on this, get it published, and mention Lojban prominently,
and we will gain some credibility.  (I would translate it as "lo'e
cabdei cu {hectic}"

>> But this literature is still focussing on descriptive use of the
>> language.  A question nowadays about "How do you say X?" in Lojban is
>> debated rationally, and perhaps decided %^).  In "real language", which
>> includes Esperanto in this case, someone who is a fluent speaker comes
>> up with an answer and it is more or less accepted as being correct,
>> whether or not it is logical.
>
>But if the answer is illogical, why should anyone be interested? Its
>logicality is the main thing Lojban has going for it.

For you perhaps.  Others see other virtues - the unambiguous syntax, the
predicate grammar independent of logical applications, the attitudinal
sublanguage.  And relative but incomplete logicality can be seen as a
moderate virtue as well.

>For Lojban there are areas of the language that simply don't exist; even
>if there were $$$$$$$$$$$$$4 available for describing it, in some places
>there'd be nothing to describe.  This is most clearly the case in
>lexicology, & Lojban has a conscious policy decision to make its design
>incomplete with respect to lexicology (word meaning).

We have decided this, indeed.  But you notice that whenever someone take
a systemic whack at some lexicological part of the language (e.g. the
gismu list, Nick's lujvo work), the decision tends to be fairly solid.
I think there is more consensus on what most Lojban words mean than
there is for most English words.  I suspect that if someone gave me
money and manpower to write a Lojban OED-quality dictionary, the thing
could be written.  But the OED requires actual citations of real use,
and there WOULD be holes in that area, but that isn't what most people
look for in a dictionary.

If you ask me how to say X, and give me enough context, then the text
for Lojban is whethher I can communicate X in said context to another
Lojbanist.  I am reasonably sure it can be done, though it might not
easy because of the high dependence we English speakers have on jargon.

>> Moreover, the last couple of years have made me feel that with regards
>> to those active people who re-elect me, I represent them
>> organizationally but not technically.  After all, Jorge voted for me as
>> LLG president, and I haven't had more than a fraction of my posts go by
> unchallenged by him in recent weeks.  That is hard on the ego and
>> self-confidence, especially when more people agree with Jorge than with
>> me.
>
>On the contrary, deep down you must be congratulating yourself for
>having succeeded in rearing a community that agrees within itself and
>is independent of you. The language is getting weaned.

Certainly.  This may be the first time since Esperanto and Ido that this
has really happened with a conlang (and I view Ido as just part of the
Esperanto independence movement).  It hasn't happened with TLI Loglan,
nor with Glosa, nor with Klingon, nor with La'adan, though I think with
the latter two there have been buddings of an independent community.

But Lojban is the first language that is breaking free before the
original prescription is fully written down to the satisfaction of large
portions of the community.

>> I don't have, and don't want, that kind of lasting moral authority on
>> technical matters.  I'd love to be able t bow out of the massed "any"
>> issues as being out of my depth.  But if I do so, and the result is a
>> drastic change to the usage of the language by you guys, my influence
>> over you and my moral authority as well will be much weakened.
>
>But the authority of a kind that would be thus weakened is also of
>the kind that you never exercise anyway.

You haven't been watching too closely %^)

I am of the school of politics that says that power in a non-monolithic
group should be wielded sparingly and subtly, or it dissipates.  The
rafsi reassignment and its timing, the exact changes to the gismu list
were accepted before republication.  In a sense I had an absolute veto
on everything, and will have as long as I am the sole publisher.  On the
other hand the way I keep that authority is by being sensitive to when
it is appropriate to make decisions, defer to the community, and in the
current situation, to recognize that the community does not yet have any
consensus.  But I can play this game only by remaining closely plugged
in.  If a decision is taken and gains standing without my agreement or
at least acceptance, then the language has become independent of me,
yes, but the prescription is also by definition finished as well.  But
still not documented.

>> I opine that one could metalinguistically make a statement at the
>> beginning of text that can change the default throughout the text as an
>> alternative.
>
>How?

ni'oni'o sei du ca'e be tu'o loi tu'o broda bei piro loi ro broda

Metaphysically equal (I define!) unspecified loi unspecified broda and
                                 all-of      loi all broda

Would convey it clearly to me.

Athelstan several years ago proposed a similar metalinguistic prenex as
a way to accomplish some non-standard usages need for writing skaldic
poetry.

lojbab