Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 09:32:21 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712101432.JAA02207@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Organization: University of Central Lancashire Subject: Re: ni, jei, perfectionism X-To: LOJBAN@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2542 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Dec 10 09:32:25 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Lojbab: > >> "many people"? I don't think "many people" have used EITHER le jei or > >> le du'u xukau. Most people who have done stuff in the langauge have been > >> doing translations, and it just doesn't come up much in literature. > > > >I don't know how much is "much" in your judgement, but in my > >judgement indirect questions are very ordinary and commonplace. > > In Lojban usage? I am talking ONLY about what I have seen in the limited > amount of Lojban text. In "literature". You said "it just doesn't come up much in literature". > Given that we have a way of expressing them that > is readily identifiable (use of kau) a large number of Lojbanists have > written things in the language and never used them. Kau hasn't been around all that long: I think I was around before kau was. And it's easy to misanalyse a subordinate interrogative clause as a free relative clause and so translate it as other than an indirect question. > So far as I know, > JCBs group has gone for 40+ years and not noticed the NEED to use them. > This could be logic errors on their part, or it could be that the types of > things that Lojbanists say/express more rarely invoke an indirect question. It could not possibly be the latter. At the same time, it is hard to imagine them not having got to grips with a way of rendering indirect qs. > >I agree it is not the type of thing that is > >> frequently needed, but then this is true of at leats half the cmavo. > >> Iff we ever return to fuzzy logic, jei will be more useful. > > > >I wouldn't have thought that would make it more useful. Tell us > >how it would. > > I'd rather not. > > It was intended that jei be used to talk about the truth value of a > proposition, which is generally expressed as "true" or "false" or "0"/"1". > My understanding is that fuzzy logic can also use values between 0 and 1 > meaningfully. Likewise probabilistic functions can use 0/1 scale of > truth value meaningfully. We identified something meaningful that someone > at the time asked how to talk about, and it seemed more akin to an > abstraction than a standard selbri. It is plausible that one could have > invented a gismu/lujvo involving du'u/sedu'u and a truth value, but at the > time we did not have du'u in the language yet - only nu, ka, and ni. One would more usually wish to assert that the truthval of a proposition is fuzzy rather than talk about that fuzziness. You could assert it using {jei}: {la sort-of jei broda}. But we might prefer to use {ja`a xi la sort-of broda}. --And