Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:18:32 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712081718.MAA12397@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Organization: University of Central Lancashire Subject: Re: On logji lojbo discussions X-To: LOJBAN@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 3305 X-From-Space-Date: Mon Dec 8 12:18:37 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Lojbab: > >Right, but to actually get across the intended meaning, it should > >have been > > > > mi djuno lo du`u xu kau la frank cu bebna > > Or perhaps "mi djuno tu'a lejeikau la frank cu bebna" Doubtful. IIRC {kau} is not well defined when not after a Q-word. With a struggle I might make some sense of your example, would it would take a lot of cerebration & conscious reasoning. > >Had jei meant "whether" it would have been VERY useful. > Since xukau and lejeikau exist this seems incorrect. I don't know about lejeikau. Is this in the refgrammar somewhere. I don't remember ever having seen it before. As for xukau, this can serve for "whether", but "du`u xu kau" is 3 syllables longer than "jei". > It would be unique > among indirect questions in not requiring indirect question marking. I have shown that all indirect questions can be reduced without longwindedness to formulae involving "whether". "Whether" itself can then be further reduced, but only in a long-winded way. > >(b) most users > >realized that using "jei" to mean "whether" would be erroneous > >(even though I am sure that "jei" was created with the intention > >that it mean "whether" > > No, since I created it. It was created specifically to talk about the truth > of a proposition. But I have seen from your own messages that you have believed that to know the truth value of p is to know whether p is true. > If I recall, cu'o was added to MOI early on as another way of dealing with > fuzzy logic, since at that time I had the apparently mistaken assumption > that fuzzy logic was akin to probability. I am not all that sure that we will > not find sufficient *linguistic* similarities to justify uniting expression > of fuzzy logic and probability, I am sure we will not. > even though I have been told that they are > totally unrelated. But I was fixated at the time on the 0/1 truth functional > scale which applies to both probability and some fuzzy logics. > > "whether" had certainly never been discussed, nor any other sort of indirect > question. > > >Note that I do not then go on to advocate any change of the > >baseline, or anything like that. Rather, I would like us to > >discuss unresolved issues, and what the best resolution would > >be, even though the results of the discussion are non-binding > >(at least not until/unless usage entrenches them). > > > >Are you reassured by that? Are we moving towards agreement? > > I suggest that I will be reassured only when there is a mechanism, formal or > informal whereby when people think they are discussiong an unresolved > problem, they document said problem at least to the level of Cowan's old > change proposals before the discussion starts. Let us agree that there is > an unresolved problem before trying to resolve it, and then use the > prewritten problem statement as a basis to track resolutions. The "solution" > wold have to be written up as a summary. Since the bulk of such issues are > semantics, I would prefer that discussions be marked "unresolved semantics > issue #XXX: sumti raising" or something like thatm, and keeop all the > issue descriptions on the ftp/web site with their eventual resolutions when > decently sumarized. I'll try to do something vaguely approximating to those stringent requirements. --And