Re: [bpfk] BPFK work

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/10/8 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>>
>> Starting an utterance with ".i" is no guarantee that your utterance
>> won't be garbled if it's taken as continuation of what someone else is
>> saying. As a trivial example, if the other speaker ended with "zo", it
>> would just quote your ".i". But there are plenty of other cases that
>> could absorb your ".i" too.
>
> That's how I think of it as working.  I don't see how that's a
> problem.  That could even make sense:
>
> A: .i .u'u mi djisku zo
> (confused pause)
> B: .i
>
> A wasn't sure what word they meant to say that they meant to say, so B
> helpfully inserted that it was ".i".

Of course that's one possible reading. It is you, the listener, who
decides which chunk of sound input you are going to treat as the text
to be parsed. You obviously can't take the whole history of sound
produced in the universe and treat that as a single piece of Lojban
text. And even if you restrict yourself to one room where you can hear
two simultaneous conversations, are you going to treat them both as a
single text mixing words from each conversation as they come to you?
No, you treat one chunk as one text and the other chunk as another
text. It's the same with two speakers participating in one
conversation. Sometimes they may complete each other's sentences, but
for the most part each produces their own text (which of course has
the other person's text as part of its context).

The problem is not that sometimes someone can complete someone else's
sentence. That's perfectly fine. The problem is if you take the
absolutist position that everything you say is necessarily a
continuation of what someone else has said before as part of the same
text. That just won't work.

> It's my opinion and preference that a switch to a new speaker should
> never automatically imply the beginning of a new text.

I agree. There's nothing automatic about it. It is often the case, but
you can't count on it being always the case.

> I would like
> to think of all of the speakers in a conversation as collaborating on
> a single text, with only rare exceptions (such as perhaps "ta'a").

"ta'a" is a free modifier, so it can be inserted pretty much anywhere
without breaking anything.

> I'm not even exactly sure what this idea of switching to a "new
> speaker" means, in a Lojbanic context.  Two different people don't
> have to be two separate speakers in Lojban, do they?  They can be
> speaking jointly, as one referent of "mi".  Surely we must allow two
> people to collaboratively speak a single text.  We shouldn't attempt
> to grammatically enforce concepts of personal identity.

And I don't think anyone is suggesting that we do. What we shouldn't
do either is pretend that most conversations are not between two (or
more) different people. "mi" and "do" in most common cases have well
defined and distinct referents.

A: .i mi gleki
B: .i go'i ra'o

Obviously that's two texts, not one text ".i mi gleki .i go'i ra'o"
with the second part being a redundant repetition of the first.

Anyway, as usual we've been completely derailed from the original
issue, which was to find a suitable example for NAI. To sum up:

(1) I think using "ienai broda" as an example of NAI is not such a
good idea, because there are likely to be two different opinions on
how "ienai" affects that bridi. In fact the example I have for "ienai"
is pretty much inconsistent with the example given here for "nai".
It's controversial because of "ie", not because of "nai", so let's
just not use it as an example of "nai".

(2) I suggested to replace it with what I thought would be an
uncontroversial case: "ienai .i broda"

(3) It turns out I was wrong, people now want to make even that second
case controversial too. I really cannot believe that people would
interpret "ienai .i broda" as anything other than the speaker
disagreeing with what was said before and offering some contrary
opinion on whatever that was.

(4) Since what we want is an example of "nai", not an example of "ie"
here, I now suggest we simply drop "ie" as the example and choose
something else: "fi'i nai", ".oi nai", ".o'a nai", "uu nai", "la'a
nai" there are lots of hopefully non controversial options, but I'm
going to let the shepherd pick the actual example so they don't feel
the need to find it objectionable in some way.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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