RE: [jboske] RE: kau: instantiation

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

And:
> Nick:
> > >What the last digit of my phone number is has changed
> >
> > Is this different from "the last digit of my phone number has
> > changed"? I don't see how right now
>
> No, but plain NPs can behave semantically like interrogatives
> -- "She asked the time", "He knows my phone number" (= whatever
> my phone number is, he knows that it be-phonenumbers me).
>
> Change example to: "Who my favourite actor is has changed", and
> you can see we are dealing with an interrogative clause.

In English, yes. In Logic? "my favourite actor" is an intensionally 
defined noun phrase, without a fixed denotation. "who my favourite 
actor is has changed" is crudely equivalent to {la'e lu le te draci poi 
selneirai mi cu cenba}. Not a question.

And in the other example, you give proof that syntactically these are 
questions in English; but at the risk of being disingenuous, I don't 
see why that necessitates they should be considered question-like in 
Lojban, and use {kau}. At any rate, I agree that "What I eat depends on 
what's in the fridge" contains semantically full predications, not just 
headless relatives: you can't say "pineapple depends on bananas", but 
"that I should eat pineapples depends on whether there are pineapples 
in the fridge". Dunno whether these are questions; but clearly these 
are not just entities.

And since I now realise you really don't intend these all to use {kau}, 
I don't quite see where you're going with this. You've professed 
kau-agnosticism, but I take it you won't be heartbroken if The Proper 
Lojban way of saying these un-djuno statements that are indirect 
questions in English ends up not using {kau}.

"What I eat depends on what's in the fridge" and "John differs from 
Jane in who their favourite actor is" are quite a spanner in the works 
for my attempt to link {kau} to {djuno}; this I admit. (The first more 
so than the second.)

> xod's praise for who and what? I thought xod thinks jboske is trying
> to pin down mirages.

For me checking what the literature outside Lojban says about these 
issues. He's not necessarily wrong, you know. jboske does have to 
demonstrate the ability to make meaningful distinctions.

[Sampson trashing formal semantics]
> Which book is that?

"Making Sense". Any thoughts on it? I did just skim it, but this is 
clearly a guy who doesn't hold his tongue. (I was all the more 
surprised his review of CLL was so positive; then again, the guy does 
do computational linguistics...)

> The stuff where we talk about meaning and try to work out what a
> Lojban sentence means is fun. When it starts to get political and
> we argue about which meaning is best for a given cmavo, things
> start to get painful, and I long for a way to shortcut the
> argument.

But inasmuch as we are responsible to a language community (and I 
believe we are), we have to do politics. If this was Lojban Mark II, 
you could define whatever you wanted wherever. But we operate under 
constraints. And currently, I am charged to enforce them. At the right 
time and place, but that is my charge.

Historical linguistics would be easier if you didn't have to worry 
about Nazis using your results; fieldwork would be easier if you could 
just cart the words home and not worry about the troublesome natives 
and their preposterous claims of language ownership. Unfortunately, we 
don't get away with that any longer: linguists are answerable to the 
language communities they work with. Formal semantics is as ivory-tower 
removed from that kind of ethical conundrum as you can get. Yet by 
choosing Lojban over Ceqli, as an engelang with a community, you 
volunteer yourself for that same bind: that community stays together 
because it expects a certain stability. Or at least, it has convinced 
itself of this.

So we will have a messy compromise: Lojban will not be as clean as we 
like it to be. And any overarching cleanliness, like I say, has to be 
done on the formalists' own dime -- not right now, and not forcing the 
entire community to join in, because it won't. Thing about compromises: 
noone walks away happy. The naturalists will get prescriptive hocus 
pocus they will squirm under. But the formalists won't get all that 
much stuff in at all, if it has to pass through universal consensus. 
And so it goes; and that's what it will take for us to stay together. 
Factions exist for good reason, you say. So does politics.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
^^
Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian, nickn@unimelb.edu.au
Melbourne Uni,, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
"Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be this
nation's number one killer." --- Henry Gibson, Kentucky Fried Movie.
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