Message-Id: <199602101602.LAA11774@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Sat, 10 Feb 1996 10:28:31 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      *old response to and #1
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR
Content-Length: 36242

An enormous number of delayed responses to And on too many subjects,
packed into one long message (I tried to work it into a logical flow,
but may not have succeeded too well):
>> but it IS possible to look at that point event as having substructure.
>> So nu mi co'a citka could be ANY of the 4 Aristotelian event types.
>
>It is entirely possible that something can be conceptualized either as a
>point event or as an activity, but equally the same thing can be
>conceptualized as a blob of red cabbage.  So I don't dispute what you
>say, but don't find it relevant to the issue of the semantics of ZAhO.

Since the semantics of ZAhO are DEFINED in terms of the Aristotelian
event types, they are quite relevant.  Implicitly, to use "ca'o" for
example means that you are NOT describing a point event, and tends to
imply that you are describing an activity or a state. za'o and co'u vs.
mu'o, referring to implicit differences from a natural ending point,
imply a process, since for all other event types, the natural ending
point is indistinguishable from any other point in the event.

>> > But now you seem to be saying that it means "I begin to eat now",
>> > while {mi bao citka} wd mean "I am no longer eating".
>>
>> Yes.  And this is is what perfectives mean in Russian too, which is
>> the only natlang I know that uses them. Actually Russian only has pu'o
>> ca'o and ba'o, come to think of it.
>
>I see.  How would you say "I began to eat"?

mi puco'a citka or mi ba'oco'a citka

>Is there any difference
>between {mi cao citka} and {mi ca citka}?

There is a difference but it may not translate to English. ca is aorist
(if I have my terms straight at this time of night), and hence mi ca
citka doesn't rule out mi pu citka or mi ba citka, whereas mi ca'o citka
normally does rule out mi ba'o citka or mi pu'o citka - at least for
this particular event of eating.  But since eating is an event/activity
which we as living creatures recurringly undertake, we might indeed
refer to multiple events of eating with perfectives.  There would be
some semantic implications in saying mi ca'o je ba'o citka, as if I had
two meals close together, whereas mi pujeca citka merely indicates that
the present time is not when I first ate.

>How would you say "I was
>eating"?

mi puca'o citka or mi pu citka

>> >If we must have ZAhOs, I like them better working in the quasitanruish
>> >NAhE way.
>>
>> perfectives have no real meaning as "selbri" - they need to be
>> instantiated with sumti to have meaning.
>
>I presume that - whether by accident or by strange design - by
>"perfectives" you meant ZAhOs.  If I presume correctly, then what are
>the sumti of ZAhOs?

No I meant by "perfectives", ZAhO-inflected bridi.  And I don't KNOW
what the sumti of ZAhOs are.

>> na'e alters the meaning of the selbri itself - on some scale,
>
>Well we agee on this at least.
>
>> without necessarily referring to any of its sumti
>
>Does NAhE have sumti?

Not directly.  But we can attach a scale place to the tanru element that
it modifies with a scale place, using be/bei and the appropriate scale
BAI.

>> (which of course can make the implied scale rather ambiguous when
>> na'e is used inside a tanru)
>
>If {cukta nanmu} is "book person", then why shouldn't {cukta nae nanmu}
>be, no more and no less straightforwardly, "book non-person"?

malglico alert - use "remna" or "prenu" for "person" - "nanmu" means a
male of the human species.  So a cukta na'e nanmu is (presuming the
standard scale) a bookish female or perhaps a eunuch/castrate, but in
one plausible alternate scale might be a male of some non-human species.

But if you ask me what a "*cukta za'o nanmu" (or "*cukta ca'o nanmu" to
make it easier in theory since za'o is often inapplicable), I have no
idea what it means.  Maybe something like a "cukta ke cabna nanmu"
for the ca'o case???

>I have dutifully returned to TENSE.TXT, but do not find that the
>discussion there extinguishes my confusion.

I believe Cowan added the perfectives discussion after the tense paper
was published in JL, and that I have no yet reviewed said discussion.  I
will be examining it quite thoroughly prior to publication.

>Subject:      TECH: observative
>Lojbab to Xorxe:
>> >I don't see any special semantic content in the "observative" form.
>> That is your problem.  It's been explained to you often enough.
>
>But I, and I imagine Jorge too, have supposed that this stuff about the
>so-called observative construction and its special meaning is just so
>much (of what you told me is called) bologna.  An observative is a bridi
>with absent x1 - full stop.  For absent x-other-than-1 we haven't
>bothered with special names.

In Lojban, x1 has a special semantic role in that it is what is called
out by a description sumti.  Thus it is proper that an ellipsized x1
bridi similar have a special role and a special term, and indeed special
semantics in normal usage.

>"Better lojban be better than it be finished" - let that be a motto.  Or
>"Lojban finished is Lojban finished".

Lojban unfinished is Lojban forever in a state of anticipative
existence.  We have constant turnover in Lojbanists and the community
grows slowly, at least in part because the language never gets "done".
The number/percentage of people who indicate that they will learn the
language when we stop fiddling with it is FAR larger than the
number/percentage of people who try to learn it while it is a moving
target.

I think that most of the INTERESTING stuff that we can learn from using
Lojban will never be discovered until we stop playing around with it
prescriptively.

>Lojbab
>> > Duration (achiev v. the rest) is not that important.
>> I don't see duration as being that much a focus of achievements/point
>> events. It is rather more aspectual - how you look at the event. If
>> you think of it as a "point" between a before and after thant are
>> non-points, then it is a point event.
>
>Any bounded situation (whether the boundaries are accidental or
>intrinsic) can be viewed as punctual - just as with physical objects.
>If you view it as punctual then you view it as without duration - as
>without extent in your field of view.
>
>This is not all there is to achievements, because all achievements have
>result states, while not all situations viewed as punctual do.  But as I
>said, I don't find the distinction between achievements and other types
>very useful, and I don't see much benefit to debating what the term
>means in linguistics.

As a result of Ivan previously criticizing our use of linguistic
terminology, we now more often than not use "point event" rather than
"achievement event".  But I think that the philosophers use the
"achievement" terminology rather than the "point event".

>> In many theories, the K/T boundary wherein the dinosaurs died out
>
>How come K stands for Cretaceous?

I think it is a Germanism.  But I am not sure.

>> had a duratiion of at least many human lifetimes, but it is still
>> seen as a point event because we don't concern ourselves with ANY
>> substructure. As an event, we don't think of it beginning and ending
>> - it just "happens". That same K/T "achievement" though may come to
>> be looked at under some theories as having a substructure - say a
>> meteor strike, followed by a "nuclear winter" phenomena, in which
>> the event is looked at more as a "process". It is this ability to
>> look at the same event in more than one way that >I< came to see
>> as being its most valuable feature to the language.
>
>Of course you're right that we can conceptualize things in different
>ways.  Where you're wrong is in thinking there's anything special about
>situation types in this respect, and in thinking that lojban is any
>different from other languages in this respect.

Lojban is "different" in that it makes the full set of perfectives
available as modals/aspectuals or whatever term you prefer as part of
the tense/modal/aspect grammar.  Since only a couple of languages even
have an explicit za'o aspect, Lojban is unusual in having that one at
all.  (I think pc said once that Irish is a language with a rich set of
perfectives).

You are not obligated to use perfectives, or indeed any of the
tense/modals, in Lojban.  Or you can use that subset that you are
comfortable with.  All of them can be expressed in other ways using
regular bridi and no tenses, though it might be long-winded or vague.
But a person from a language rich in perfectives will appreciate them
(as Nick did, which GREATLY increased the frequency of usage of these to
the point where I think they are at least as common as the pu/ca/ba
tenses)

>  I can believe {koa mue
>i koa puu i koa zirpu i koa brifu i koa cecmu i mua cui cai} - but so
>what?

I have no idea what "ko'a mu'e" or "*ko'a pu'u" might mean (nor
mu'acu'icai - intensely not-particularly exemplary???).  "ko'a pruce", I
understand, along with "ko'a mokca".

>> - or more exactly - you mixed heavy and light grammatical structures
>> in such a way as to make it less than obviosu what their boundaries were.
>
>You'll need to explain to me more clearly what you have in mind here.
>
>> And you rearranged the terms for no apparent reason except to be
>> obfuscatory.
>
>I did no *rearranging*.  I did only *arranging*.  There are no rules
>concerning reasons for possible arrangements.

There is the implicit rule that any deviation from the shortest, most
unmarked form of expression should have SOME reason for being used.  I
think that this is a Gricean maxim of some kind, as well as perhaps a
corollary of Zipf's Law.

"heavy" and "light" grammatical structures in Lojban terms are those
that require more or fewer levels of parenthesis, elided terminators,
and implicit ellipses, respectively.  Among the recognized reasons for
non-standard sumti order are 1) emphasis on one particular sumti by
moving it (alone) out of its normal position; 2) relocating a sumti to
avoid an inconveniently "heavy" sumti before another sumti, or perhaps
before the selbri (this is the explanation I favor for "cumki fa lenu
..."); 3) fronting a sumti for parallelism with a description sumti -
this usually involves using SE conversion as well; 4) matching a
translation or native language word order structurally literally; 5)
poetry - i.e. to match a certain rhyme or rhythm or word/sound-pattern
scheme.

The movement out of numerical order of more than one sumti is probably
not justifiable except for reasons 4 or 5. This doesn't mean it is
illegal, but it IS a hindrance to communciation.

>Current Lojban usage has a style like you'd expect of a children's book
>- as simple as possible.  Naturally most present users value easy
>communication more highly than anything else, but I was attempting to
>dip my toe into the expressive powers of less well visited areas of
>grammar.

Nora's textbook writings and examples are children's bookish.  The stuff
written as part of the Chinese whispers is almost certainly not.
Rearranging sumti seemingly at random has NO apparent expressive
purpose, and that is precisely why it is stylistically dead.  I am no
foe of experimentation - my favorite "sport" is to try to express
reasonably complex expressions as sumti-less tanru after the fashion of
my admitted no'e seldjuno of Chinese.

>I don't know.  I suppose they have to tell people something, and its
>safest to tell them the same things everyone else is telling them.
>
>Your questions imply that fi-fa-fu is analogous to OSV in English and to
>passive.  It isn't.

I agree - the English usages have stylistic meaning. fi-fa-fu does not.
There is neither recognized convention nor implicit Gricean or other
linguistic basis to give reader any idea what you intended by the
placement of each sumti.  In the meantime, you stretched the mental
juggling of human parsing by forcing people to keep too many slots
unresolved - your example was a sort of center-embedding of a 5-place
predicate in the middle of an unresolved main bridi, where in addition
you rearranged the terms of that center-embedded subordinate
description.

Now the fact that in addition you used the still-unusual constructions
of "jai" and "me" added insult to injury, but I do consider their usage
to be a valid sort of stylistic experimentation.

Looking at your text again:
> >   [fi la pou lojbab ralju]
> >   [fe lei jai fau skicu
> >       [be fo lo jbovla]
> >       [bei fe maa]
> >       [bei fai ro da poi kea me maa]
> >       [bei fi da]]
> >   [fa diu]
> >tinbe

The result of your usage included a string of 16 consecutive cmavo.  I
dare say it would not be easy to write an understandable English
sentence that used 16 consecutive English function words (i.e. words
that are not nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs).  Lojban WILL have more
cmavo than English, but I think it still requires SOME content to be
understandable.

>It is usually not obfuscatory to say something in more words than
>necessary.  It is commonly asserted that is is obfuscatory to say
>something in more words than necessary, but the commonness of this
>assertion is attributable to widespread ignorance about language rather
>than to its essential truth.
>
>In (1) the presence of "some" does not increase difficulty, while in
>(2-3) the presence of "that" reduces difficulty.
>
>(1) I found (some) coins down the back of the seat.
>(2) I doubt (that) it will.
>(3) I met the man (that) she had been telling us about.

Adding one word is quite understandable and acceptable.  Adding words
and changing order is less so

"Down inside the back which was a part of the seat some coins were by me found."

would probably be considered stylistically unacceptable English.

Likewise

"That it will is doubtful to me".

or

"There was this man that she had about him to us been telling that I met."

Your usages seem to me as strainedly abnormal as these.

Later post:
>> Different thread:
>> >> >> and the subcategories allow me even to define a substructural way of
>> >> >> looking at that occurance.
>> >> >{lo pruce jai fau broda} would do just as well, and would have a
>> >> >proper syntax-semantics match.
>> >> The use of jai IMPLIES the existence of an abstraction by
>> >> transformation.  Provide the explicit transform, please, without using
>> >> any abstractors.
>> >I don't understand. Please try again.
>>
>> Since "da jai broda" is defined to mean that there is an abstraction in
>> x1, of which da is a sumti, there must exist such a grammatical
>> abstraction which results via transformation in the raised form "da jai
>> broda".  Since we know that is a raised form, I am asking you to define
>> the corresponding unraised form.
>
>But that's a different use of {jai}, isn't it?  I used jai + BAI, but
>you're talking about jai + SELBRI.

jai + SELBRI implies that the x1 place of "SELBRI" is an abstraction
    raised from the stated x1
jai + BAI + SELBRI implies that the BAI place of "SELBRI" is an abstraction
    raised from the stated x1

Thus your example "lo pruce jai fau broda" is the same thing as
broda fau tu'a lo pruce, or
broda fau lo su'u lo pruce cu brode

>> >I don't think any construction necessarily expresses something
>> >nondynamic.
>[I meant: in English]
>> >Progressives must denote things that are dynamic. Duration can be
>> >tested by acceptability of durative _for_.  Telicity in verbs is
>> >harder to test - if you can say things like "in 3 hours" then it's telic.
>> If I understand this, then there is nothing in the definition of any
>> predicate forbidding sumti tcita "for" phrases and/or "in 3 hours", so
>> all Lojban predicates are telic and durative (except that a point event
>> abstraction is semantically defined to treat the duration as being
>> semantically of insignificant length).
>
>Strictly speaking, it is wrong to say that *predicates* are telic and
>durative, for it is situations that have such properties, not predicates
>(which are logical objects).

OK, be picky.  Lojban predicates are textual representations of what we
call relationships, and you seem to be calling situations.

>For some but not all gismu the definition entails that some situation is
>involved and it has certain properties - e.g.  {cinba} necessarily
>involves a kiss, and that is clearly not a state.

Why not?  Have you no imagination?  I picture statuary of two lovers
embracing, and have no problem viewing their act as lo za'i cinba (the
statues are kissing, in addition to them being la'e a perhaps more
transient event of kissing)

>I don't see how you extrapolate from English to Lojban.

I'm not.

>  I can't retrace
>your reasoning by which you reached the multiply erroneous conclusion
>"all Lojban predicates are telic and durative".  Please try again.

All Lojban predicates (or what they represent if you prefer) are BY
DEFINITION optionally seen as having telic and durative properties.  Or
in Aristotelian terms, there are no arbitrary reasons why one cannot
view any predicate "situation" as a state, process, activity, or point
event.

>Take some particular eddy in the universal flux.  Call it Ted.  Ted is
>what happens when the 100m sprint final is held at the LA olympics.  The
>property of being a race running does not inhere in Ted.  It is you who
>categorizes Ted as a race running (& indeed it is you who marks Ted off
>as distinct from the rest of the universe that is not Ted).
>
>Now, one of the things we know about the class of race runnings is that
>one of its membership requirements is that its members be a process,

This is by definition NOT a membership requirement in most any Lojbanic
class (the x1 of pruce being an obvious exception).

>just as being a dog entails being a mammal.  So if you categorize Ted as
>a race running, you are categorizing T as a process.  If you categorize
>Ted as, say, a state, then you can't categorize T as a race running;
>rather you have to categorize T as a race-running- oidal-ish-thingy,
>which is a category distinct from but similar to Race Running.

Then in that case, virtually all Lojban predicates are
"-oidal-ish-thingys" and not equivalent to their apparent English
counterparts, because they do NOT inherently restrict to processes or
states in internal structure.  (But I don't think that English words are
so restrictive either - it is just more unusual in English to look at
things in unusual ways of this sort).  I can choose to talk about "Ted"
(in Lojban) and NOT recognize the evolving nature of Ted, but rather see
only the steady-state properties, and thus think of Ted as a "state".
Or I can refer to the repetitive nature of the substructure of Ted
(laps, paces) and think of Ted as an "activity".  Or I can be thinking
about how Ted is simply so incidental to the eternity of the universe,
that Ted is a "point event".  But recognizing these different aspects of
Ted does not change the fact that Ted still is the same race-running.

I could easily analyze Fred, which is "lo nu cinba" as either of the
four types by choosing to recognize different aspects as preeminent.
("Aspect" does refer etymologically to the way one looks at something so
this seems quite appropriate. telicity and duration are thus aspects of
a Lojbanic "situation" and not normally "properties" of it.)

>> True (unless you are talking about American footballs), but few if any
>> Lojban predicates are semantically defined so as to be constrained in
>> duration, telicity, or dynamite (%^).
>
>None of the Lojban predicates are defined yet.  That you insist on
>leaving up to usage.  But, examining usage, I believe you're wrong.  See
>my remarks above, esp. re cinba.

They are defined with respect to those potential constraints/aspects -
specifically, the aspects are not restricted.

>> I speak English quite well. but I guarantee that there are a lot of
>> usages for which I cannot expressly state the rule I use to justify
>> a given usage
>
>I venture that there is no usage for which you can expressly state the
>rule.  That does not matter.  What matters is that you know the rule,
>and we can tell that you know the rule because we can observe you using
>it.  Working out what the rule actually says is what keeps academic
>linguists employed.

A ball falls to the ground.  By the above logic, the ball "knows" the
law of gravity.  We observe instances of the law of conservation of
energy.  But physics theorists came up with reason why that law may not
hold absolutely due to quantum mechanics and black holes.  The "law" may
thus be just a description of events that we have observed and tested.

The rules we attribute to English are a model of the way our minds
behave when faced with examples that we label with the name of the
language.  It is NOT clear that the model is reality, that our minds
recognize anything remotely like the rules in the model, or even that
the rules in our minds have any linguistic properties at all per se, as
opposed to being representations general pattern-matching rules that
govern biochemical interactions, that in turn cause what we call
thinking and/or speech.  The rules may be (and I think ARE) an illusion,
and probably at best only an approximation.

In the case of a conlang, the prescription is indeed a governing set of
rules.  But we already know that actually Lojban use does not always
follow the prescription.  I don't claim that you are not writing Lojban
when you leave out the apostrophes, do I?.  Nor, even if I misunderstand
some experimental cmavo that you have proposed that I have not learned,
can I justifiably say that you are not speaking Lojban in using that
experimental cmavo.

>> Well, there OUGHT to be a brivla for every member of ZAhO.
>> And tanru are supposed to be - tanru, and NOT "rule-governed" in
>> semantics.
>
>That's why I object to their being suggested as a solution.

Since Lojban semantics as a whole are explicitly NOT "rule-governed",
then you object to all of Lojban as a solution.  %^)

>> There is little justification for loading up selbri with all
>> manner of reducers of semantic ambiguity - it is our assumption that
>> such semantic ambiguity cannot be completely eliminated, and therefore
>> we are not inclined to do a halfway effort.
>
>The justification for loading up selbri with "all manner of reducers of
>semantic ambiguity" is both great and obvious: it reduces vagueness.

But in Lojban, degree of vagueness is optional.  In English, people have
to STRETCH the language, and even to misuse it (by having words mean
other than their denotations) in order to be vague (listen to any
politician for an example).  In Lojban, the vagueness is built in, and
you have to be more wordy in order to be more precise.

>> Because people memorize the places in a certain order rather than as
>> having certain place numbers, and you are intentionally marking them by
>> their place numbers.  This forces the listener to tag the sumti by place
>> number and overtly rearrange them in his head for interpretation per the
>> selbri place structure.
>
>If true, then this would indeed be a reason why fi-fa-fu is hard.
>But if true, it means Lojban is syntactically unlike natlangs, which
>indeed it may be.

A cigar for the gentleman!  Since no natlang has a predicate grammar, of
course Lojban is syntactically unlike natlangs.  But this is irrelevant.
Languages with strong word order rules may technically tolerate
violations of that word order and still be understandable, but it is
also possible that they will NOT be easily understood even by a native
speaker.  A poetic sentence like "To the store via the main drag go I".
is understandable, but at some level of complication a similar sentence
structure would cease to be understandable even to a native speaker in
real time.

fi-fa-fu Lojban is theoretically analyzable on paper, just as 10-deep
center embeddings in English.  But whether either will work for the
language in real usage is questionable enough that the rules perhaps
should NOT exist in an infinitely recursive form.  In natlangs, I
believe that the "rules" do NOT work with infinite recursion.  In
Lojban, they work by prescription, but pragmatically may fail to even be
understood.  In Lojban, we have the option of actually claiming that our
rules are a reality even when people cannot use them fluently.  Natlang
"rules" that people cannot use fluently are not rules.

>There is no defined reason not to do so, either.  None of this stuff
>you're on about is in the refgrammar.

Thereby suggesting that it is not necessarily part of the standard
language (or that John needs to add to the material %^)

>My purpose is not to be obfuscatory or ornery, or at least not for the
>hell of it.  Lojban is defined as having syntactic capabilities far more
>complex than those that actually see use.  What is actually used is
>pidgin lojban.

By that logic, then what gets used in real life is "pidgin English"
because deeply center-embedded sentences are not used or understood.

>If you find the result difficult, it shows either that you just don't
>have a good enough command of Lojban, or that there are real parts of
>lojban grammar that are determined but not yet promulgated in documents,
>or that the design doesn't work.  Personally, I think it is most likely
>that the first of these is so, and least likely that the last is so.

Whereas I think that there are pragmatics and semantics rules that will
apply to Lojban as used, rules that will deviate from the prescription
and which will NOT be documented (and perhaps not "determined").  The
level of nesting of Lojban's theoretically infinite nested structures is
an example of such a rule that will never be prescribed; so are limits
on rearranged orderings of sumti.  But the worst that one can claim out
of this is a parody of Chomskyism - that no Lojbanist will ever ever
have fluent "performance" that matches their "competence" in the
language.  Are no English speakers fluent because no English speaker can
understand a 10-level center-embedding?

>> >I see no problem to entering CVVV space.
>> I do.
>
>That's not a good reason for not entering it.  The less that design
>decisions are subject to the whims and delusions of individuals, the
>better the decisions will end up being.

This is not a "whim" of an individual, but a policy of Lojban Central.
We are not going to use experimental cmavo space prescriptively.
Anything written in the language documents/books at this point is a
prescription.

>> >The appeal of Chris's suggestion
>> >is that it satisfies both camps - Jorge & I cd use kea & ignore
>> >keae & keaa, while you & John cd use keae and keaa & ignore kea.
>>
>> That is not a "solution".  We are simply using two different words
>> to mean exactly the same thing, or in this case, 3 words to cover
>> 2 meanings. If you are concerned about wasting an extra cmavo, why
>> aren't you concerned about the extra one here?
>
>Because in effect, Chris's solution is "let's have two different
>dialects, one with kea, and the other with keae and keaa, and by
>choosing backwater cmavo for the latter dialect, we indicate that the
>former is more sensible".

We also not going to define multiple contradictory dialects as part of
the prescription.

And since I don't agree that your approach is the more sensible, I would
not make that indication.  Instead, we will use ke'a and cu'e, and you
can use an experimental cmavo to combine both into one.

>Since there's no risk of ambiguity, anyone who wants to can use kea as
>the lambda-variable, and the result will be grammatical and
>intelligible.

Not intelligible to me - butthen I have little normative force until I
get to start using the language again.

>I also propose, following a suggestion by you, that kea be usable within
>to...toi as a reference to, by default, the outermost bridi of the
>sentence containing to...toi:
>
>  Sophy, as I'm sure you know, is married.
>  la sofi n to kea zou mi birti kuau do djuno kea toi cu ca speni
>
>  Sophy is, I fervently believe, unsurpassedly beautiful
>  la sofi n cu to mi carmi krici kea toi traji leka kea melbi

I won't pretend to understand this.  We have nei/no'a/la'edei for what I
think you are trying for.  Probably because I never have understood the
proposal, I haven't the vaguest idea what distinction you are making in
creating a ke'a prenex inside the parentheses in the first (and not in
the second).  Nor do I have any idea what your experimental cmavo means.

Sophy, as I'm sure you know, is married.
la sofin ca speni sei do .ia djuno tu'a la'edei

Sophy is, I fervently believe, unsurpassedly beautiful
la sofin traji .iacai melbi

ni'o (do I dare get into this one???)
>I contend that you describe "hunting" correctly, but that your
>description does not apply to "kalteing".  {mi ba kalte lo mirli} means
>only "There is a deer I will hunt".

The latter would be "mi ba kalte (pa)da poi mirli".

I would translate your lojban sentence "I am hunting some deer" and it
would have the same degree of opacity/transparency as the English, so
far as I know (not that I can keep straight what an opaque or
transparent sumti reading might be).

>> I don't know of a use for it, except those special cases (already
>> covered by other means) when we want external reference in opaque slots,
>> when there is a specific deer I am hunting (Ol' Snagglehorn) or I have
>> a guarantee of success (past tense references to successful hunts, for
>> example -- but how did we talk of even those hunts before we went out?).
>> And this applies to all the old opaque words other than those that take
>> full bridi arguments?  We can only paint pictures of real scenes? We can
>> only look for things we are sure to find ( Jesus' assurance seems less
>> inspiring in Lojban)? Even are dream girl must be the one down the
>> block?  Well, not quite, of course, because we can say the right thing
>> eventually, but to get there we have to mow through a mass of things we
>> never use except at the bottom of heaped _lenu_ clauses. Hawk (I omit
>> the correct spelling here since it is the vilest insult in Klingon and
>> I do not want to embarrass Nick) ptui!
>
>Basically yes to all these, except for the picture painting.  For the
>picture painting, the scene can be non real if it is selected from an
>expanded domain of the not-necessarily-real.  The way I had thought to
>do this is with {dahi}, as in {skicu lo dahi gerku} - where the dog
>comes into existence in drawn form - but this can't be right, for {dahi}
>is in UI and therefore metalinguistic, whereas the purpose for which I
>had been attempting to put it to use very much changes truth conditions.
>So something in - I suppose - NAhE is called for, to expand the domain
>from the real to the not-necessarily-real.

I disagree violently - maybe I need that Klingon epithet myself.  (Isn't
the vilest Klingon insult to call him a nice guy???)  This gets to the
core of whether lo {unicorn} claims existence.  All of the above
questions SHOULD be answerable "no".

I would not like to use "da'i" for an opaque/transparent distinction
(another case of loading up meanings of a cmavo such that one has no
idea what is intended by it), but I would favor/welcome a solution that
uses a single discursive to distinguish opaque/transparent (with the
unmarked case being indeterminate except from context, as is normal for
Lojban).  It is of course NOT true that discursives in UI never change
truth conditions.  Attitudinals do not do so (though they can change
whether truth conditions are meaningful or not - this is slightly
different from what Cowan claimed later in this discussion), but
metalinguistics can modify context, pragmatics, and in some cases serve
as abbreviations for multiple claims.

>Sisku should really go back to behaving like kalte & co.

Agreed (for once!)

>> If the x1 is generally agentive, I tend to agree with Chris that the
>> presumption is speaker point-of-view, unless there is contravening
>> context (in stories, for example, I think we developed a convention
>> whereby the speaker is empathically identifying with some character in
>> the story - in reported conversation, it might on the other hand be
>> attempting to report the attitudes of the speakers in the conversations.
>
>I think such story contexts should be left in the realm of pragmatics.

But one purpose for metalinguistic usage is to specify a particular
pragmatic condition.

>[We mean "discursive", not "attitudinal" - attitudinals are things like
>"Wow!", while discursives are things like "frankly" and "unfortunately"
>(unless one of those is what indicators are).]

Indicator = attitudinal.  Discursive refers to words that are
abbreviations for metalinguistic claims and modifiers.  "However" and
"In addition" and "For example" and "etc." are simple examples.  But
"etc." modifies a truth claim in that it indicates that there is more
tot he claim than is stated.  "and vice versa", and "respectively" also
affect truth claims because they serve as abbreviations for complex
bridi that are related in structure to the current one.

Related point from another post:
>(ii) both that koa believes that I move the
>earth, and that I intend that I move the earth.  But it definitely does
>not mean koa believes that I intend to move the earth.  So I would
>contend that UI can affect the truth conditions of utterances but not of
>all bridi.  And, since "already" is something you'd want to say in
>subordinate as well as main bridi, UI is the wrong selmao for it.

But "already", and most other discursives are not something that are
affected by speaker vs. ko'a oriented.  Indeed that may be one major
difference between attitudinals and discursives.  UI selma'o refers only
to the grammar, and not to the semantics.  It is possible to place UI in
a sentence with long scope or with short scope.

One problem with your analysis of this example is that you are
forgetting the metalinguistic nature of UI, whatever its scope.  There
is no way UI can get at the subordinate selbri "move", and substitute
for it a different selbri "intend".

>lb> If du'u is a one-place predicate then "da du'u broda" has some
>lb> properties - is it a relation, a sentence or what?

"du'u" is not a one place predicate (nor does it make one).

>My objection to {duu} is that it is pointless for it to be a selbri.
>Whenever I used {duu} I was always irked that the choice of gadri was
>utterly irrelevant

Not utterly, since as you said, "li" was inappropriate.  Your argument
would seem to apply to any places of selbri that are inherently
singular.  Now since "le" can make any intensional result fit the place,
you probably want to use "lodu'u" when talking to an uncooperative
listener (or maybe "da poi du'u" if you really want to operate
logically).

There is more than one value for the x2 of a du'u selbri for any given
x1 - if nothing else, there are multiple languages that the claim can be
expressed in.  So even if the x1 is an inherent singularity, there is
still a purpose to du'u in relating truth claims to the relationship
they claim.

>We've been through this.  It doesn't work.  It couldn't handle "He is a
>happy ex young-president" {koa gleki bao ke citno ralju}.

ko'a gleki ke purci ke citno ralju
ko'a gleki gi'e ba'o citno ralju

>It is pretty clear that this change will not come about officially.  As
>far as I'm concerned, Xorxe & I were just pointing out that aspectuals
>*should* have NAhEish grammar.

Use a tanru (or a compound/multiple bridi if tanru are too ambiguous for
you).  All tense/aspectual modifiers are metalinguistic abbreviations
for another bridi, so if your claim is correct, you should always be
able to phrase it some other way.

>> Take {mi ba'o citka lo plise}. I know I used the construct a lot. If
>> your suggestion passes, lots of text will become outdated and hard to
>> figure out.)
>
>As far as I can tell offhand, the only thing that would be affected is
>old {le broda zao brode} which ought now to become {le broda cu zao
>brode}.

Not so simple.  If only aspectuals are grammatically like NAhE then they
could not be used as part of tense constructs, since the latter are
built by the lexer.  If all tense/modal structures are grammatically
like NAhE, then other complications would result.

 lojbab