Message-Id: <m0sOtqt-0000YjC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Thu, 22 Jun 1995 22:17:08 +0100
Reply-To:     ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject:      Long reply to Lojbab's splurge.
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 12807
Lines: 258

> "ni gunma" itself is a challenging concept - is this
> And's porridgity?)

In some contexts yes, in others no. Last thing I remember was we were
thinking {ni} is sort of like {jei} but not necessarily a scale bounded
at both ends.

> If I could easily concieve of a myopic singular "water", I could perhaps
> evaluate your argument more effectively.

I am currently unsure about whether {lohe broda} is logically distinct
from {ro loi broda}. Either they are, or Jorge's story about {loe}
not logically being a sumti is right. I think pc was going with the
latter, in which case my reports about the meaning of {loe djacu}
may be inaccurate, but here goes: {lo djacu} is an amount of water.
{loe djacu} is the one single amount of water there is; you can drink
{loe djacu} and then find some water in another glass, in which case
these two amounts of water would be one and the same, both drunk and
undrunk.

> >{loi} and {lei} are porridgifiers:  you add discrete ingredients & mash
> >them up so their boundaries vanish - you end up with a porridgey blob.
> I am not sure that the boundaries HAVE to vanish in order for it to be a
> mass concept.  And in fact boundaries don't fully break down in all
> cases.  "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?

> 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?

> I think that pluralization of typicality is more complicated than you
> have stated.  It is harder to say with only 2, but if I said "mi viska
> lo'e prenu paki'omei" I would not have to be an ardent feminist, nor
> to have a gender-specific context to question this if all 1000 turned
> out to be males.

Well, this either means "I saw the one and only thousandsome of
people", or "I went person-thousandsome seeing", the latter being
my attempt at a rendering of the Jorgean reading. Either way, it
doesn't make much difference to appropriateness if all were men.

> >> I therefore think of lo'e as a displayant of the ideal prototype
> >> properties of the class.
> >This I feel is a job for a selbri "x1 is a displayant of the ideal
> >prototype properties of x2".
> Well, you would need a place for the standard/person holding the ideal,
> but I get your point.  But you could also then say that "le broda"
> should be expressed using some predicate like "x1 is described by
> speaker x2 for listener x3 as if it were a member of set x5" (I am not
> trying for pedantic accuracy in this example).

I don't think that would be equivalent to {le}, since (a) unlike
{le} it could be false (e.g. if there is no da such that I describe
it as broda), and (b) you lose the specificity of {le} (which, I
think, is not equivalent to {da voi}).

> 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.

> >> >What are the properties of {zo'e}?  I thought it was that it could be
> >> >equivalent to {da} or to {keha}; I didn't realize it had extra magic.
> >> I have no idea what to make of equating "zo'e" to "ke'a" in the simple
> >> sentence "zo'e blanu".
> >That {zoe} can be +specific, or non-specific.
> You mean "ko'a blanu"?

Yes.

> 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?

> and the fact that I used an x6 on klama poses no semantic problem.

Why not?

> >> 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}.

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

> I could live with re prenu meaning "ro lo re lo prenu", I think. or
> maybe even "ro le re lo prenu" a specific but veridical twosome.  The
> question is whether we want "re prenu" to be specific/definite or not.
> "ro lo re lo prenu" is quite non-specific/non-definite.

Surely it is pretty firmly established that {re prenu} is shorthand
for {re lo prenu}? If the decision could be made anew, I think
{ro le re lo prenu} would be better, since it would be more often
needed than {(ro) lo re lo prenu}, but I'm sure that would go against
established usage & entrenched understanding of {re prenu}.

> Nothing is solid with "quantifier+lo" till we decide (and agree) what
> "lo" means.  Right now, every posting I read that mentions the word "lo"
> feels like quicksand.

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.

> >> Yes, but if Lojban is to be used for linguistics research, then at some
> >> time, we have to treat it like one.
> >On the contrary, it will be of no interest to treat it like one if it
> >isn't one.  Lojban is already being used for linguistics research -
> >that's what all the "how do you say it?"s and similar discussion on this
> >list is.  The interest in these questions is not the answer to the
> >question "how is it customarily said?" but to "how should it logically
> >be said?".
> 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.

> 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.

> >> I mean complete in the same sense that we say any natural language is
> >> complete.  We do not and cannot fix the leaky roof of the English
> >> language, and many would say that no one has a "right" to.
> >The Lojban design is massively incomplete by this criterion.  There are
> >huge gaping lacunae in the semantics and the lexicon.
> I don't think so.  The Lojban PRESCRIPTION is massively incomplete.

Since it lacks (virtually) native speakers, Lojban is its prescription.
Natural languages exist in speaker's minds. You might wish to say
Lojban exists in speaker's minds too, but intramental Lojban is
probably a bit of a mess.

> But one cannot say that the design is incomplete unless I cannot
> communicate with you and get across my point without relying on
> English-native semantic conventions. That Jorge and Tobar, native
> speakers of Argentinian Spanish and Croatian, have been able to carry
> on indefinitely long conversations in Lojban, and that Ivan Derzhanski's
> translations from Bulgarian into Lojban were widely understood show that
> the actual gaps in the semantics and lexicon are not real - people can
> coin understandable words that are understood in context, even though
> the context and conventions are not that of their native language.

This just shows how much use speakers can make of pragmatics.
Psycholinguistic studies have found that people with impaired language
can communicate linguistically quite effectively nonetheless.
I would go along with saying Lojban has the status of a pidgin,
and I'd maintain that pidgins are incomplete in similar ways.

> But it is incomplete to some people who feel that a language isn't
> complete until you have an OED quality dictionary of the near-total
> language vocabulary. Georgian and Inuit are quite real languages, but
> probably neither is documented as well as either Lojban or English in
> grammar, semantics, or lexicon.

Georgian & Inuit exist in speaker's minds. That they may not have
been thoroughly documented is due to a lack of resources and the
failure of linguists to have worked out how language works. But
in principle it would be possible to write a massive grammar and
dictionary of Inuit. 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).

> 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.

> I don't have, and don't want, that kind of lasting moral authority on
> technical matters.  I'd love to be able to 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.

> >> {loi broda} is by definition identical to {pisu'o loi broda}.
> >By current stipulation, not by definition (in the sense that it doesn't
> >inhere in the meaning of {loi}).  I oppose the current stipulation both
> >because it is inconsistent, applying only to {loi/lei/lai} and because I
> >don't know of any way of explicitly cancelling the implicit {pisuo}.
> I think it is by definition - it inheres unless overridden explicitly.
> You cancel the implicit quantifier by putting in your own explicit one.
> Why is this hard?

It may not be relevant to {loi}. But for {lei}, you have a contrast
between the mass, a portion of the mass, and the whole of the mass.
The current default is the whole of the mass. I don't know how
to change this to just the mass. E.g. "I like the bookage",
as distinct from "I like all of the bookage" {mi nelci (piro) lei
cukta}, "I like some (and possibly all) of the bookage" {mi nelci
pisuo lei cukta}. Just as {mi nelci le pa cukta} means just "I like
the book" rather than "I like all of the book" or "I like some (and
possibly all) of the book".

> 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?

---
And