From nicholas@uci.edu Wed Sep 12 16:16:03 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: nicholas@uci.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_1); 12 Sep 2001 23:16:03 -0000 Received: (qmail 29509 invoked from network); 12 Sep 2001 23:16:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 12 Sep 2001 23:16:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO e4e.oac.uci.edu) (128.200.222.10) by mta1 with SMTP; 12 Sep 2001 23:16:02 -0000 Received: from localhost (nicholas@localhost) by e4e.oac.uci.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA10581; Wed, 12 Sep 2001 15:45:10 -0700 (PDT) X-Authentication-Warning: e4e.oac.uci.edu: nicholas owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 15:45:10 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: To: Cc: Nick NICHOLAS Subject: Re: lojbabbitry a (ce'u) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Nick NICHOLAS X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 10663 Recent disagreements notwithstanding, I largely agree with the tenor of pc's remarks: * Membership in a selma'o may imply nothing to Lojbab about a cmavo's semantics; but absent any better information, the natural default assumption is that it does. If you want Usage to Decide, be prepared for Usage to do the natural human thing of drawing categorial inferences. * I may disagree with pc on what si'o means (I don't know, because regrettably I've lost track --- Elephant Elephant Elephant!); but I certainly agree that discussing it is meaningful, and that this is not an eggheaded abstract discussion, as Lojbab implies (a display of "anti-eggheadism" I find pretty rich, coming from someone presiding over a language dedicated to people speaking in predicates), but rather a discussion with obvious linguistic consequences on what it makes sense to say in Lojban at all. Saying si'o is what goes into the x1 of sidbo is lamely circular, in any case. Without concrete examples (is Communism a si'o? Is pleasure? Is going to the store? Is me going to the Starbucks coffeehouse at 11:05 AM, last Monday?), I can't take any of it seriously. * This wide-eyed metaphysical constraint guff has just got to stop; and it should certainly not be getting in the way of defining what the hell these words mean in the first place. If you want to be metaphysical in your own time, go ahead; but when people of flesh and blood speak Lojban, in a Newtonian universe, of course it makes sense to tell them that you can't say {mi djuno lenu mi klama le zarci}, because that implies that going to the store is an event happening inside your head, instead of a thought. If you want to say that in some hypothetical universe there's no difference between events and thoughts, knock yourself out --- but why on earth should I be saying that in a *beginners* lesson? The same goes for si'o: if not all "ideas/concepts" are either propositional (du'u) or experiential (li'i), for God's sake give me a specific counterexample, not an alternate reality, or Lao Tze's Gedankenexperiment of being a butterfly. People of flesh and bone don't talk like that. Lojban supporting descriptions of the Common Sense universe take priority of Lojban supporting solipsism, general relativity, time travel, or whatever else. Get the basics anchored first; then do your metaphysical expansions. Or do you really think the Hopi couldn't tell the difference between today and tomorrow, and the Trobriand islanders (Massim District, Northeast Papua New Guinea) couldn't tell individuals apart? -- == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == Nick Nicholas, Breathing I REJECT {gumri} nicholas@uci.edu (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)