Date: Sat, 18 Oct 1997 00:44:57 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710180544.AAA21301@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Gregory Higley Sender: Lojban list From: Gregory Higley Subject: Re: Problems with Abstraction X-To: Logical Language Group To: John Cowan Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1638 X-From-Space-Date: Sat Oct 18 00:44:58 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Residents of Lojbanistan, I looked at the relevant chapter -- 11 -- in the refgram, and it cleared things up for me. But I think the mistake I made was in looking at an abstraction in isolation, without realizing that, in most usages, it would be embedded in some way in a bridi, e.g. la djan prami la djordj le ka la djein cu prami la djan John exceeds George in the property-of Jane loves John I realize that normally {la djan} would be omitted in the abstraction, but this serves to illustrate what all of you realized and I was too dense to catch. Of course, it's possible to invent all kinds of sentences which play havoc with {ka}, but of course, none of these are very useful for communication ... AS AN ASIDE ... la djan prami la djordj le ka la djein cu prami la djosef I decline to translate this, and I don't regard it as a defect of the language. It is possible in any language to create grammatical nonsense, although the heights to which you can go with this are exceptional in Lojban. This is great. Looking at the reference grammar has rekindled my interest in Lojban. I am still a bit critical of the language -- although next time I'll be sure to look at the refgram before shooting my mouth off -- not in terms of its structure as such, but in terms of how usable that structure is by humans. I think the vast majority of Lojban sentences can be expressed without having to resort to the hideous, horrible, and anti-human FA, but I still think that place-structures are largely unusable. Oh, well, that debate is as old as Loglan ... At this point I'm rambling, so I'd best sign off for now ... Gregory