From xod@sixgirls.org Thu Aug 23 19:50:51 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: xod@reva.sixgirls.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2); 24 Aug 2001 02:50:51 -0000 Received: (qmail 5534 invoked from network); 24 Aug 2001 02:26:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 24 Aug 2001 02:26:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO reva.sixgirls.org) (64.152.7.13) by mta3 with SMTP; 24 Aug 2001 02:26:21 -0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [[UNIX: localhost]]) by reva.sixgirls.org (8.11.3/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f7O2QLZ21927; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 22:26:21 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 22:26:15 -0400 (EDT) To: Cc: Olivia Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: remoi malglico (was: A revised ce'u proposal involving si'o In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Invent Yourself X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 10022 On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Nick NICHOLAS wrote: > > cu'u la xod. > > >I want to argue against And's proposal too, but my arguments are based on > >the differences between "relationship" or "quality", and "idea". They are > >not based on any differences between "ckaji le ka ce'u broda ce'u" and > >"sidbo". Here again, are we letting English concepts poison our > >understanding of similar-but-different gismu? > > xod, the metalanguage of Lojban is still English. Inasmuch as {si'o} has a > definition at all, that definition is "idea/concept". We can guess at what > an 'idea' or a 'concept' are in English; how the hell are we supposed to > guess what a {si'o} is in Lojban? Is it a {sidbo}? But then, what's a > {sidbo}? Is it an idea, or a concept? Or both, or neither? What is an > idea, anyway? How do you get away from English there? By prototype? By > formalism? Who will tell us? Will it be you? Will it be me? > > malglico is a good thing to be on the alert against. malglico purely for > malglico's sake is not. You're asking for a bootstrapping that I think > impossible. We can't agree what a 'concept' is in English, and saying it's > actually a {sidbo} in Lojban solves this? With the defined place structure > "x1 (idea abstract) is an idea/concept/thought about x2 (object/abstract) > by thinker x3"? Which disambiguates what exactly? Since you know more than one language you surely know words in one language which are difficult to translate to another. (Let's see you explain "campy" in Greek.) Such words require paragraphs of explanation. If "sidbo" == "idea", and if every gismu really just means a single word in English, then Lojban is an elaborate code for English. It also means that any hope of searching for a Sapir Whorf effect is a joke! In any case, such bootstrapping is difficult but not impossible, because if it were there would only be one language on the planet. There are even words and phrases and noises in dialects that are difficult to explain explicitly in their parent languages! We can create new concepts that do not have easy analogues in English or any other natural language. Part of building a new language is creating an entirely new universe of discourse, a new way to stare at the common world and break it down into concepts. Words and grammar are the mechanical part, and in my opinion the boring part. What makes a language interesting to me is not its grammar but the way it looks at the world. It's the "100 words for snow" issue. And again, if there's no attention to this, then there is really nothing but lip service towards the S-W effect. I am attracted to Lojban because I am interested in such issues. I want to see the world a different way and hopefully a more logical and better way. But not the same old English way! So this is where I could say "If you aren't interested in this, why choose Lojban? If you want X you know where to find it.", where X = "English". Part of the Lojbanic worldview could be some deep relationship between ckini and sidbo which is obvious to the jbojbe but difficult, not impossible, to explain in English. This is why I can't trivially argue against And's proposal simply because the English ideas don't match up. > No; we have to keep talking about this in English. Certainly not! We have at least two Hebrew speakers if not three on this list. Perhaps they could discuss some of these issues in Hebrew and see what they arrive at, for instance. > At least with formalistic approaches, you're not expressly copying > English. Talking about {si'o} with a bunch of lambdas is not inherently > malglico; I would have thought it's a good thing. In fact, it was the > *only* way I could understand what Lojbab means by his protean {ka}: by > not concentrating on any of the places, he's concentrating on the > {selbri}. (Wish he'd said that earlier, of course.) Sorry, I don't know what a lambda is. If you can point me to a URL that will teach me the rudiments of this Lambda Calculus, I'll read it. > Talking about {ce'u} (and lambdas) was formalistic, and my impression > was, this is how we've worked out what {du'u} and {ka} are --- not, in > the first instance, by talking about English "properties" and > "propositions". I think > it absolutely legitimate to expand this to {si'o}; and I now think And's > proposal makes me understand {si'o} more, not less. > > I'm rapidly tiring of these running street-battles, btw. If it does come > down to who yells the longest, it won't be me... I don't know what this means. I am shifting the reference frame of these "running street-battles" to one that might invalidate some of them. If you're tired of the flame wars, give me a hand here. In fact, a possible logical extension of this idea is that the baseline is an unchangeable artifact, like any natlang grammar over the time span of an education, and ponder what the hidden assumptions of it are. This is a position of extreme conservatism, that could never discuss the idea of resolving the contradiction of vo'a, for instance. vo'a would simply be taken to refer to {either the self-bridi or the main-bridi}. Tough luck if the reader finds it confusing. "Isn't it interesting", this viewpoint would notice, "that while Lojban is so precise about everything else, concerning this they are ambiguous!" ----- "It is not enough that an article is new and useful. The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. [...] It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures." -- Supreme Court Justice Douglas, 1950