Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 20:17:20 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711270117.UAA12905@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Sender: Lojban list From: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Subject: Re: Events & sisku [was: le/lo] X-To: lojban To: John Cowan Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 987 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Nov 26 20:17:25 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU cu'u la ed >There is a Zen koan, "What is your face before your parents were born?" ma flira do pu le nu le do rirni cu jbera No problem in saying it in Lojban. >There is also the problem of Plato's beard, described by Quine as "a >tangled doctrine that has often dulled the edge of Occam's razor" since we >can talk about it even though it doesn't exist, and may never have existed. You can say that in Lojban too: lo firkre be la platon na ca zasti ije cumki fa le du'u fy na ze'epu zasti But whether the things we talk about exist in the real world or not is not crucial to this discussion. We are trying to find out what classes of sumti make sense as arguments of a given predicate. >Some gismu have a place for the intended ontology. Can someone give us an >example of that usage? I'd like to see it too. Ontology places are the kind of places that I think gismu should not have. (Or if some do, then all of them should, to be consistent.) co'o mi'e xorxes