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Re: [jboske] so, singulatives...

At 11:12 PM 12/13/02 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote: 
OK, because I'm getting confused very quickly, I want to make sure
I'm on the same page with my learned friends on the other side. :-)

The victory And proclaimed on lo'e (which, yes, was premature) is
that we accept lo'e is a singulative. In other words, lo'e takes a
population of potentially members, and somehow boils them down to one.

This, unfortunately, doesn't answer much, because you can boil down a
population to one in many, many ways. So, let's take ages as an
example property -- a nice stats example.

There are in the world five prenrxluxramute (wherever the hell
Khlukhramut may be.) Of these 5 people, Abe is 30, Bea is 27, Col is
30, Di is 112, and Eoin is 2.

How old is lo'e prenrxluxramute?

If squinting is all about stats and modes, as I've taken it, s/he's 30.

That's not the only way to get a singular out of a plural. A maximum
will do it too. So a different kind of squinting would see only the
extremes, and make it 112.

Therefore squinting is a predication, with an additional place indicating the method of singularization. We can either decide that 1) lo'e is one particular kind of squinting, or 2) that it is a vague (zo'e) kind of squinting, unless a restrictive phrase is attached which indicates the kind of squinting. Metaphysical parsimony would favor the latter (and similarly vague solutions to most other problems of the gadri), and we would devise formulations (and brivla where needed) for some of the more common kinds of specific that we might wish to call out.

If it's all about the prototype, and the subjective, as And suggests,
then how old lo'e prenrxluxramute is depends on who's talking.

Yes. I do prefer a prototypical view.

And yet, I come back to what my forebears have. The prototype in this
sense is closer to le'e than lo'e.

I think that the ideal lo'e is either the prototype that would arise from an objective observer (if such could be found). le'e prizes subjectivity, and presumes that the observer is looking at the prototype of a limited set, choosing to exclude any outliers that do not fit his prototype.

The keyword is 'typical', and the example is 'The lion lives in
Africa'. And I think that's picking the objective mode of squinting
("I surveyed all lions, and found..." An encyclopaedic statement is
not contingent on personal experience.

We seem to have reached the same conclusion by different means (that happens a lot with you and me, I notice).

This is fettering lo'e to an English construction, and it's not
making lo'e as useful as it might possibly be.

le'e still exists, and I still think lo'e with a restrictive clause would allow other modes of squinting.

But I think this is
still the sane and conservative thing to do.

The prototype still lingers in such statements, though. As someone
has pointed out, such encyclopaedic statements imply a 'real lion':
when you talk about lion habitats, it's implied that you're talking
about them in the wild. If 70% of all lions live in Western zoos, the
encyclopaedias still will speak of Africa, because they're appealing
to the prototype, that still lives in the wild. In that case, I'd
rather Lojban overliteralise, and say that {lo'e cinfo cu xabju loi
darlyjmazda}.

arguer-foot-den? Is the lion living between your toes?

I finally see where you're coming from, And; the point of lo'e for
you is not 'typical', but 'singulative'; and 'prototypical' is a more
satisfying singulative than 'typical' (or at least, it often is ---
often enough you want to be able to use lo'e for prototypes.)

I would live with changing the definition of lo'e to "prototypical". Indeed, I may have done so in 1988 - keyword choices were made as much for brevity of typing in LogFlash as for definitional accuracy, something for which you and many others may chastise me for eternity. But we never thought it would be 15 years to write a dictionary.

Maybe,
maybe not; but 'typical' is what the word list said; and while the
word list has said a lot of stupid things, it is what has informed
most of our understanding of these words. It also informed John's
Lion; and John's Lion, being in CLL, is going to be exceedingly hard
for us to sidestep.

John's Lion was of course informed by my Lion, which was informed by JCB's Lion, the lion being the exampole that appeared in the original discussion of TLI Loglan's lo'e-equivalent (which is loe, unsurprisingly).

It might be worthwhile here to look at what JCB said, even if it is not binding on us:
http://www.loglan.org/Loglan1/chap4.html#sec4.20
(loe is lo'e, leu is le'e, lea is rolo, or at least that was the 1988 intent.)


http://www.loglan.org/Articles/sets-and-masses.html
is also relevant, bearing in bind that TLI "lo" is our "loi"

and perhaps
http://www.loglan.org/Misc/loglan-lw-by-lexeme.html
which reminds me that JCB also used the keyword "typical" for his version of loe.

(In the first cite we observe that pc was co-inventor of lo'e, as well as lo which derived from lea, and that both were added on the basis of arguments from formalist logic - one would have to look back at the original TLs to see the details. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to send to And, Jorge, and other byfy people who wish to argue the formalist input to the baseline, some of our several sets of old TLs so that in reinventing the wheel they can see how it was first invented - I think you already have one Nick, and Cowan does as well)

lojbab

--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org