Re: [jboske] RE: fundamentalism as fundamental (RE: Re: gadri paradigm:2 excellent proposals

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

> Here is a definition of lo'ei if you are really interested:

Oh god.

Ok, I have had my response to your lo'ei for some time, we never argued 
it, and nor will we now. I'll put it up now again.

First, you know how badly your buska went with me; it's dousing flames 
with gasoline to think it'd work with Jordan.

You yourself admit that, if we have a landing site for a prenex, lo'ei 
isn't needed. So:

mi djica lo mikce =
su'o da poi mikce zo'u: mi djica lenu da co'e

mi djica lo'ei mikce =
mi djica lenu su'o da poi mikce zo'u: da co'e

We don't have prenexes wherever we might need them: we have them for 
djica and djuno and nitcu, we sidestep them with ka...ce'u for sisku. 
But they might turn up in other preds, where we have no embedded 
proposition to put a new prenex in front of.

The formal semantics mainstream answer, since 1974, has been to allow 
prenexes mid-sentence, whether there is an embedded proposition there 
or not.

The minority answer is propositionalism, assuming that there are 
*always* embedded propositions.

It's assumed that, when you imagine something, that something is 
intensional (you can look for something that doesn't exist, and you can 
also write about something that doesn't exist.) Montague would tell you 
you're describing [for some x] x. Propositionalism will tell you you're 
describing {lenu su'o da zo'u: da co'e}.

I posted a paper here recently, which said propositionalism was crap, 
because it couldn't come up with a consistent co'e for imagining (or 
finding).

You might also try the Lojbanic {mi skicu leka ce'u prenrtlingana}. Be 
careful you don't say {mi skicu lo ckaji be leka ce'u prenrtlingana}, 
though --- that claims Klingons exist (su'o da poi prenrtlingana zo'u: 
mi skicu...} --- {lo} is veridical.

This is a big lurking problem. I think Jorge's solution is a kludge. A 
non-kludge is either not going to fit Lojban (prenexes mid-sentence?), 
or be terribly disruptive (describing lambda expressions?)

And we'll leave it for another day, for Christmas' sake...

[Nick Nicholas. French & Italian Studies, University of Melbourne 
]
[ nickn@unimelb.edu.au http://www.opoudjis.net 
]
[There is no theory of language structure so ill-founded that it 
cannot]
[be the basis for some successful Machine Translation. --- Yorick 
Wilks]