[lojban-beginners] Re: How versatile is "nu"?

[Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>]

I don't know, I somehow see {mi djuno lo jei lo broda cu brode}*  as considerably easier to understand than {mi djuno lo du'u xukau lo broda cu brode}. You're right that length alone isn't that big of a deal. We were talking about this in IRC recently actually, and someone was thinking that {go'i} was longer than it needed to be when there are so many little-used monosyllabic cmavo. By the end the general conclusion was that a difference of a single syllable here and there wasn't that big of a deal.

But to me {jei} actually does make more sense than {du'u xukau}. Indirect questions in general are confusing to me, and I never quite got a grasp of them in Latin, where I had a pretty good grasp of most other things grammatically. They flow naturally in English because it's my native language, but when stripped of the thought flow that English grants, I get perplexed by them in general. By contrast, truth values make perfect sense to me; if it didn't sound bizarre to talk about them in English I would probably talk in those terms.

*I think I can say this in this way, though I might be wrong, since {djuno}'s x2 is labeled as a du'u in my dictionary...

mu'omi'e .latros.

2010/3/15 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
> Incidentally, I don't quite understand why "truth value" shouldn't come up
> in conversation once you're using a short term like {jei}, which is
> considerably less cumbersome and IMO more straightforward than the
> alternative, especially in a language which has part of its basis in
> classical logic.

I doubt that the length of a word will have much of an effect on how
often people will talk about what the word denotes. If something is
spoken about a lot, it may happen that it will acquire a short and
convenient word to refer to it, but it seems to me that providing a
short word for something will not really make people want to talk
about it.

As for truth values, they may come up when talking _about_ logic, but
not necessarily when using logic or when talking logically. Also, when
talking about logic you are more likely to talk about truth values in
general, rather than the truth value of a particular proposition, and
"jei" is not very useful for that. Not that I see people talking about
"lo se jetlai" much either. It seems that Lojbanists don't spend much
time talking about logic in Lojban.

mu'o mi'e xorxes