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

Joel Shellman wrote:

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?


No.  That is the norm, but not a requirement.

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-download_wiki_attachment.php?attId=193
sections 14 and 15 discuss a wide range of tanru that are possible


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 other words, it is potentially a figurative relationship.


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?
I think he means (by his invocation of "logicians) that from the standpoint of logic it is unanalyzable - cannot be decomposed unambiguously into some combination of components which might be easier to logically evaluate. 


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?
Is a "giant" necessarily of "great physical size". In English it is not, as evidenced by ... "intellectual giant".
In Lojban we have a *little* more constraint, in that the place structure of the modificand must be accounted for in a tanru. But one can still be quite creative even with that restriction, because even a selbri with all the places filled in can be applied "metaphorically" to the tanru relationship. 


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.
That was certainly the case for me, especially when I was trying to teach others, which is why I started using the Lojban words instead of the English words (can you imagine having this "metaphor" discussion *every* time you teach a new person? - call it a tanru, and the discussion usually isn't necessary). 

lojbab