Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 16:38:09 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710242138.QAA08924@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: The design of Lojban X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2266 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Oct 24 16:38:15 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Jorge: >And: >>> Lojbab has said that he sometimes sees people as events, so >>> event Lojbab may yet happen to defend it. :) >>I agree with Lojbab here (always surprises me when that happens). >>To my mind, restricting a tersumti to a nu serves only to exclude >>abstract objects like numbers, ka, du`u, and so on. > >Well, I may agree with you. I don't agree that you can have >{le nu broda cu prenu} = "the event of brodaing is a person" >or {lo prenu cu fasnu} = "some person happens". I still say that you can have the latter, though I would translate it as "Being a person happens" or "Having a personality happens" for the English and it then makes more colloquial sense. In Lojban terms, we might prefer lonu da prenu cu fasnu to lo prenu cu fasnu, but I think they mean essentially the same thing. For the other example, if a computer exhibits apparent personality in pseudodialog (as with Eliza program), we might say "le nu le skami cu gasnu la elaizys. cu prenu". It seems to me that le prenu is anything that exhibits lenu ce'u ckaji le ka ce'u prenu (hop I am using ce'u corerectly here,though perhaps I need subscripts). The requirement for all this to make sense is to take a "long view" such that we see the entirety of a person's life or of the behavior of a computer as a person, as an "event" interpetable per one or more of the event contours (activity, process, point event or state). When we talk of a person's life as being "a flash in the pan" in some long view of things, we are clearly seeing that person as a point-event. Human beings don't normally think of human lives as being on a scale suitable for "events". On the other hand "light" is nothing more than the manfiestation of quantum events is easily seen as a non-abstraction. Likewise the various subatomic particles. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@access.digex.net Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/" Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.