Re: [jboske] lo'e

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

I'm not interested in getting bogged down. It is because I am furious 
with the routine bogging down of the participants on this list that I 
rarely say anything at all. And no, I haven't read the existing 
threads carefully. Not when they're as illegible as they've become. 
No apologies for that statement.

And I don't hold with xod either that there's no point in 
formalisation. But I do hold with him that any formalisation of lo'e 
that does not make explicit a notion of typicality is useless. And if 
your formalisation of lo'e using buska contains a notion of 
typicality, I ain't seeing it. Furthermore, your response to pc, 
"let's see whether my definition of lo'e is internally consistent 
before we see whether it has anything to do with CLL's lo'e" is, as 
you'd expect, a red flag. You wanna do that, do it. That's what 
experimental cmavo are for. Establish that your lo'ei and Lojban lo'e 
are --- or should be --- the same thing; *then* proclaim their 
identity. Not before.

The point of all this is, you are not completely wrong. lo'e *is* 
intensional, and non-countable. But you are making lo'e much more 
general than it should be, and I continue to find that unacceptable.

Concretely (and CLL pretty much says it): {lo'e cinfo na xabju la 
gugdrirana}: the typical lion does *not* dwell in Iran. Come up with 
a formalisation of lo'e which accounts for that, and we're describing 
the same thing. Until then, we aren't.

As to formalisations, I've given you as much of a formalisation of 
lo'e as I think is warranted. More concretely, I don't think my 
formalisation is any less formal than yours. You're trying to sneak 
in a lambda calculus paraphrase, but you're doing it through the back 
door, and with nonce gismu; but in the end, you're still defining 
lo'e through paraphrase. Well, so am I; but I'm capturing the notion 
of typicality, which you aren't.

I don't think either of these paraphrase approaches are particularly 
satisfying, btw. I assume that's why you've started talking lambda 
yourself...

In particular:

> > It is true to say {lo'e cinfu cu xabju le friko}, because most lions
> > live in Africa most of the time; and *enough* lions live in Africa
> > *enough* of the time, that we are entitled to make a generic claim.

> I agree it is true. (I disagree about the reasons, though.)

Then you are disagreeing with the baseline. Because CLL says that's the reason.

> > What are the properties of the Llamban {lo'e cinfo}?

> {lo'e cinfo} does not refer to any particular thing. Are you
> asking what the properties of lions are?

I am asking what can be predicated of it. I am asking whether it can 
be said that {lo'e cinfo cu nakni}, {lo'e cinfo cu fetsi}, {lo'e 
cinfo cu xabju le friko}, and {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le gugrdirana.}

My understanding is, under baseline lo'e, only the third claim can be 
made. The other three claims aren't true, because they aren't typical 
of lions, because they aren't true of enough lions to be tenable 
generic claims. CLL explicitly says the typical lion cannot be male 
or female, because there is no clear preponderance.

You've pretty much said:

> What is this Llamban you're describing? Does it have anything
> to do with me? {lo'e cinfo cu xabju ge le friko gi le gugdrirana}
> is true, of course.

No 'of course' about it, I contend. So we aren't describing the same 
thing. And if lo'e cinfo is in any way derived from {da poi zo'e tu'o 
ka ce'u cinfo} or whatever, then I don't see how it can be the same 
thing: your presentation of lo'e is a superset of what is canonically 
understood by it, because it allows anything predicable of any lion 
to be predicated of {lo'e cinfo}. And that's not helping.

There's a subtext with why I've all of a sudden gotten so aggro about 
defining words, which my fellow board members know well. Suffice it 
to say that you, Jorge, qua individual, can do as you please, and 
make lo'e mean la, or whatever. As if I could stop you. But when 
things get ex cathedra (and the baseline is still to be completed, so 
things are still to be said ex cathedra), lo'e cannot mean la. It 
must mean what it was prescribed to mean, and what the majority of 
Lojbanists want it to mean. You may think Lojban is too important to 
be fettered by the fundies; all I can say is, when it comes to the 
completion of the baseline, it is too important for it not to be.

Make your lo'e encapsulate the *keyword* for lo'e, Jorge, and we can 
talk. Until then, we cannot.
--
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* Dr Nick Nicholas, Linguistics/French & Italian 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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