Hello over there

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

Hello over there. I'm still over here (as in, not participating.) My 
proofreading is pretty much done, so I will answer the last fortnight's 
emails next week.

My ideology of how to fix the gadri impasse remains unchanged, and I 
remind myself and you of it:

(1) The Unique/Kind is a valid thing to introduce into Lojban (I do not 
eat the same meal as you do, but I do eat the same kind of meal), and 
deserves a LAhE

(2) The lojbanmass is a primitive in Lojban terms, and a composite in 
formal terms: is a conflation of individual, substance, and collective. 
There must be a disambiguation between substances and collectives, and 
at least some jboskeists accept that tu'o/ro does it. That may need 
some ironing out. We should also get over our distaste of sets and look 
at them more; they may well yield a good solution. If none of this 
works, we may end up with another LAhE; I don't believe this warrants 
another gadri.

****

(3) I object to an intensional gadri mainly because a distinct gadri 
implies a distinct ontology --- but in propositionalist contexts, our 
old gadri serve us just fine (mi djica tu'a lo mikce). If 
propositionalism covers all intensional contexts, there is no problem 
to solve: this dissolves into prenex placing. I think the sane thing to 
do is to keep the gadri even in non-propositionalist contexts, and 
attach kludges to do with da'i, ka'e, and as yet uninvented UI. There 
are other solutions that should also be investigated before we latch on 
to a novel gadri -- such as 'Nixon prenexes' (the term is xod's, 
because I said that mid-sentence prenexes were first proposed in 1974).

Very often, we might need recourse to the other kludge, which is the 
lojbanmass: this clearly becomes the default for events instead of 
{lenu}, using the individual interpretation of the lojbanmass (the 
substance version makes no sense for events, and I doubt the collective 
one either; loinu as Any-event-x does, though.)

But I don't think the answer is another gadrow (in fact it cannot be, 
since masses are also intensional), nor is it to subtract specifity 
from {le}. I am committed to upholding the backward compatibility of 
the Lojban gadri paradigm as much as possible. And the fact that our 
current gadri work just fine in propositionalist contexts makes me 
distrust any tampering with gadri: that's not where the issue is. So 
there.

I was intending to summarise two papers which I think would help here 
--- Carlson's on Kind, and Link's on Masses and Collectives. But I 
found I couldn't speak Montague well enough; so I'm reading Dowty's 
introduction (which is very readable.) I have no idea if I'll get time 
to.

I've stalled on the BPFK because I'm trying to trace a candidate who 
isn't answering his mail. I intend to get it started before I leave 
town (20 Jan), and I intend a resolution to gadri to be an early task 
for it to tackle.

****

In other miscellaneous news:

I just looked through a book on the classifiers of Kilivila, the 
language of our friends the Trobrianders. Yes, it is just a classifier 
language, nothing to learn here that John hasn't already learned from 
Chinese. As for the Mr Shark bizzo, like any mainstream linguist I'm 
sceptical of the "Gee whiz" exoticisation that underlies much 
Sapir-Whorfism. And classifiers pervade this language, they aren't 
limited to sharks: would Malinkowski claim that the Trobrianders really 
see all people as avatars of Mr Human? All songs as avatars of Mr Song? 
All daytimes as avatars of Mr Day? These people were animists, they 
weren't druggies. (Although with another mob I've come across, the 
Tariana of the Amazon, I have my doubts: they think every new day's sun 
is a brand new object.)

Reading through the Kilivila classifiers, and how they can be changed 
at will (so, three animals (individuals) of fish, three strings of 
fish, three plates of fish), I was reminded of the psychosis recently 
peddled here (I don't remember if it was Jorge or Bob, and whether it 
was serious or not), that lo nanmu can be a quantity of human, not just 
an individual, but potentially a bunch --- so lo nanmu could quite 
legitimately refer to one human, one team of humans, or one scoop of 
human flesh. Yes, it could. But no natural language is that fucked up, 
and I don't see why Lojban should be: the classifier languages, which 
allow nanmu to mean both individuals, bunches. and scoops of humanity, 
have perfectly distinct classifiers, thank you very much, to 
differentiate between these senses: they *say* "an individual of 
humanity", "a bunch of humanity", "a scoop of humanity". {lo nanmu}, 
mean all three? Who the hell does that benefit?

If you scratch beneath the surface, you will find default classifiers 
for different entities. The default classifier for people is going to 
be the individual. I have no compunction in making {lo nanmu} mean an 
individual, not by default, but always. {lo nanmu} comes with no 
classifier attached; why not make it the reasonable classifier?

So what to do about {lo rismi} -- is it a cup or a grain of rice? Here, 
I'm inclined to go all metaphysical bias after all. If we know the 
entity to be saliently, prototypically individuated in real life, {lo} 
refers to such an individual. If not (as with rice and peas), {lo} is 
truly ambiguous, and should be interrogable, {lo dembi} can be either a 
bean or a go of beans. But unless you're on drugs, {pa lo nanmu} cannot 
be a sextet. Allow it under defeasible circumstances, if you must, but 
it must still be absurd.

****

If something truly is an event, then what it describes truly happens in 
the world. If something truly is a proposition, all that is required of 
it to meet propositionhood is that it have a predicate and arguments. 
It is pernicious folly to confuse the factivity of nu with du'u: du'u 
is a claim. I hope we won't see this confusion again.

Note to self: \lx.broda(x) denotes a set of x, but is a function 
mapping x to a proposition. This is an old confusion: the denotation of 
'red' is all the red things in the world, but the actual job of 'red' 
is to map entities to 'yes, is red' and 'no, is not red'. So indeed it 
belongs in ka ce'u broda , which when satisfied maps to du'u ja'a broda 
and du'u na broda.

Lots of confusion to be had in this stuff. One thing we're entitled to 
feel smug about, though. Just as the Chinese were stumped by "White 
Horse Not Horse", Montague was stumped by "The temperature rises. The 
temperature rises. Therefore, ninety rises?" Think of how that is said 
in Lojban. Lojban can't fall for that. And you'll see why equative 'is' 
really is bad for you.

--
DR NICK NICHOLAS. FRENCH/ITALIAN, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA.
nickn@unimelb.edu.au Tour orghnie tou gerou na ninere,
http://www.opoudjis.net tou p!ounte si na mh si ninere:
"Hearken to an old man's advice --- not to his farts." Tsakonian 
proverb.