Re: [jboske] mei, latest cause celebre

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

The Lojban way is that, though you can leave anything you want to 
pragmatics, you must always be able to disambiguate with an explicit 
paraphrase. This ability is the major selling point of Lojban for a 
lot of Lojbanists, possibly the majority. (Sapir-Whorf stuff be 
damned.)

Right now, you have no way using Lojbanmasses of disambiguating 
between distributed and collective readings, for the simple reason 
that, though lo is +distributed, loi is not -distributed, but 
unmarked as to distributivity.

So the lack of a -distributed gadri gets in the way of Lojban design 
goals. In fact, that there are *no* Lojban means of disambuguating a 
reading as being collective. {gunma}? Lojbanmass, not collective. 
{mei}? Ditto. {jo'u}? If Jordan has his way, ditto. Yeah, pragmatics 
tells you that {lei nanmu} is collective not distributive. But there 
is *no* disambiguation in Lojban whatever right now, using explicit 
words rather than pragmatics. None. Including {nanmu remei}, which is 
still a lojbanmass. And {jo'u} isn't enough -- not if you're talking 
about a million man march, as distinct from a million people going to 
DC at some stage in the year (lo), or the NAACP leadership, on behalf 
of its million man membership, going to DC (piano carrier 
supervisors).

*This* is what is broken.

As to Jordan's syllogism, this depends on where time and place are introduced:

su'o da poi temci ku'o
su'o de poi diklo zo'u:
naku la djan. jo'u la djeimez. bevri ca da vi de
su'o da poi temci ku'o
su'o de poi diklo zo'u:
naku piro lu'o la djan. ce la djeimez. bevri ca da vi de
su'o da poi temci ku'o
su'o de poi diklo zo'u:
pisu'o lu'o la djan. ce la djeimez. naku bevri ca da vi de
which is false.

su'o da poi temci ku'o
su'o de poi diklo zo'u:
ca da vi de naku la djan. jo'u la djeimez. bevri
su'o da poi temci ku'o
su'o de poi diklo zo'u:
ca da vi de naku piro lu'o la djan. ce la djeimez. bevri
su'o da poi temci ku'o
su'o de poi diklo zo'u:
ca da vi de pisu'o lu'o la djan. ce la djeimez. naku bevri
which is true.


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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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