[lojban-beginners] Re: Quick Reference Guide for language words

["Joel Shellman" <jshellman@gmail.com>]

Please consider my remarks as they are intended: my search for understanding.


> http://www.loglan.org/Loglan1/chap3.html#sec3.11
> > But we must now inquire more closely into the meaning of such
> > phrases. If X is a short man, does this mean that he is short and a
> > man?

The "man" part restricts us to the set of all men. The "short" further
restricts it only insofar as, there is a non-trivial set (which should
be defined by context in order for reasonable communication) for which
it would be appropriate to use the term short for this specific man in
relation to the other members of the set.

Now... in English, that set could be limited to a subset of all men,
OR it could be the larger set of all humans--or some other set in
between. I'm curious... are tanru strict in implying that the set must
be a subset of the modificand?


> > How blue does a house have to be to be blue?

As blue as it would be required for some person to apply the term blue
to it. In other words, all that is stated is that there is a
relationship between the house and the term blue. The nature of that
relationship would likely have to be inferred by context.


> > In Loglan we surmise, with most logicians, that such questions are
> > unanswerable by direct analysis. We suppose that the meanings of
> > predicate expressions formed of two or more constituent predicate
> > ideas are like the meanings of simple predicates themselves:
> > essentially unitary and unanalyzable.

Unanalyzable? I mean, from the phrase "blue house" one can analyze
it--that there is something which could be considered "house-like" and
that it has some relationship with the concept of "blue-like". That is
an "analysis", but is it such a vague analysis that it remains to be
considered unanalyzable? Looking at it that way seems to suggest that
the entire language would thus be considered unanalyzable. Can
language be considered/modeled completely as a system of expressing
relationships (with relationships being a first class citizen) between
things? I would think so.

Unitary? If calling it unitary implies that a blue house is a blue
house is a blue house, than, at least in English, that doesn't make
sense to me. Given context, these phrases can have very different
meanings. Now, in lojban, if the assumption/requirement is that a
tanru has the same requirement of "no unrelated meanings"... hmmm...
my first impression is that would get really tricky really fast...


> > blue house. Like houses themselves, or blue things, you have to be
> > shown one to really know. And intellectual dwarfs? Well, here again
> > it is not the art of logical inference, but a sense of irony that
> > helps one to understand this phrase; that and having heard the phrase
> > 'intellectual giant', with which it strongly contrasts.

Given the restriction of no unrelated meanings, the metaphoric
intellectual giant I would expect is impossible in lojban--or perhaps
what I mean is that it would not be metaphoric. Would you say
"intellectual man-of-great-physical-size"? You might, but it would not
mean what we generally mean in English by intellectual giant. Perhaps
I'm missing something?


> > they may be. So language grows. New predicates arise. And we suppose
> > that the first step in that process is the coining of fresh metaphor,
> > and that this always involves the "misuse" of some old word.24

Ah... is this the whole point? The concern/suggestion that a word gets
"misused"? Hmmm.... interesting...


> we chose to assign a gismu-root word to
> refer to the specific Loglandic/Lojbanic concept, and abandon the use of
> the possibly confusing English word.  In all of the cases where we
> started using Lojban words, the motivation was the same - to avoid the
> conflicting definitions of the corresponding English terminology.

Makes very good sense to me. I saw a review of lojban by someone who
complained about exactly this. I don't think he got the point. Trying
to put your language views onto another language can be useful as an
initial learning path, but at some point, will likely become a
hindrance and require to be unlearned before achieving mastery of the
new language.