Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 04:55:31 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712090955.EAA14799@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: ni, jei, perfectionism X-To: a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2453 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Dec 9 04:55:32 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU >> "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. 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. 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. >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. The concept remains useful for its original purpose, which is indeed rather less rarely invoked in language than indirect questions. But then re'a matrix tramspose/dual is likely to be even more rarely used %^). 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.