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Re: [lojban] Re: xorlo podcast
On 9/29/05, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> --- Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I, on the other hand, don't think there ever
> > was a shift
> > away from CLL-lo to something that could be
> > called prelo,
> > unless you are talking of my use of {lo'e}.
>
> Then I wonder what it was that was being
> discussed in all those early gadri exchanges,
> which appear to me to be about {lo} in
> essentially the pattern I am adhering to.
There was prior discussion, yes, but no conscious use
of any {lo} by anyone, that I know of, other than CLL-lo.
Another precursor of xorlo (never actually put to use as such)
was what And called the "excelent solution" the XS proposal,
which can be found here:
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=XS%20gadri%20proposal>
and
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=XS+gadri+proposal%3A+And%27s+version>
This is not identical to xorlo, but all the essential features are
already there. (I can't tell when it dates from because the history
of the page was lost in some wiki move, but it was before 2003.)
> > (Certainly there were people misusing CLL-lo
> > all the time,
> > but those were mistakes, not conscious usage of
> > a
> > different proposal.)
>
> Well, from a strict point of view, you have been
> misusing {lo} for years now,
Not true. I have only used CLL-lo before xorlo, which came
about only this year. Before xorlo I used {lo'e} for the generic
sense.
> but, like the people
> in the discussions I have been in, you were
> usually aware and explicit about using -- and
> propsoing -- a deviant system.
Not for {lo} before xorlo. You must be misremembering. (Not that
it matters all that much, it wouldn't have been out of character
for me to do so, but in fact I did not consciously use {lo} other
than as described in CLL before the BPFK's xorlo.)
> I threw away my Loglan books a long time ago, but
> do remember editing pepers for The Loglanist
> which went basically like the arguments we have
> been having here over the years.
These two articles by JCB nicely summarize the Loglan system:
<http://www.loglan.org/Articles/sets-and-multiples.html>
<http://www.loglan.org/Articles/sets-and-masses.html>
JCB was very didactic, so these articles are not a bad read for
Lojbanists. Even though the Lojban and Loglan systems are not
identical they are very similar so the articles are worth reading
for anyone interested in these matters. You need to do some
word conversions, as follows:
Loglan Lojban
le le
leu lei
lea loi ro
lau lo'u
lou vu'i
lua lu'u
e e
ze joi
neni pano
ro so'i
ra ro
lo lo (as in xorlo)
"set" "mass", "collective", "nondistributive group"
"multiple" "individal", "distributive"
"mass" "generic"
> At one point
> JCB did write a murky paper on Loglan {lo} which
> seemed to come out with the gavagai explanation
> -- but no one took it to seriously and continued
> doing what they had done before, which was as
> close to the {lo} I am backing as could be done
> within the blinders of a positive definition of
> {lo}.
I'll quote a bit from JCB's sets-and-masses where you get a mention :)
"But by 1975 it had still not become clear to me where the
sensible limits of lo-usage lay. It wasn't until a few years after
the publication of the first Loglan paperbacks in 1975--not until
1978, in fact, when John Parks-Clifford and I were discussing
the merits of Scott Layson's proposal that we add a formal
"observative" to the language (Scott's proposal had been that
we enable our observative with a regular inflection of the
predicate)--that both of us discovered, more or less simultaneously,
that we already had an observative! We had lo. It was then that
Lo fagro! and Lo simba! entered the language. To mean what?
Well, of course to mean the purest of Trobriandic ideas, namely
that some manifestation of Mr. Fire or Mr. Lion is prowling in the
neighborhood. [...] Accordingly I personally began to use lo, and
to urge others to use it, in observative-like ways: that is, to celebrate
any manifestation of these giants--as in Mi pazda lo taksi ["I'm
waiting for a taxi" -xorxes] and Ea mu godzi lo sinma ["Let's go to
the movies" -xorxes] --by using the lo-forms...not as species-words,
not as words with which to discuss the distribution of the "parts" of
these massive individuals; for that, in fact, is what the lo mechanism
cannot do well and what the language of sets is perfectly-suited to do.
Thus, when it really doesn't matter which manifestation of some mass
individual gets involved--as it doesn't in waiting for a taxi or in going
to the movies--lo is the word to use."
> I hope, by the bye, that now that we have come up
> with a functioning interpretation of xorlo, you
> are not now going to change your wish list yet
> again (in this case, go back to an earlier one
> which got weeded out because it introduced
> apparently contradictory elements into the
> whole).
I can't "go back" to a place I never left.
> The sense in which {lo} has anything to
> do with Mr. Rabbit or with gavagai is remote from
> the origins of those concepts, to the point that
> bringing them up introduces more smoke than
> light. xorlo is a disaster enough for a logical
> language, without trying to bring back yet more
> remote metaphysical muckery -- with, as usual --
> no benefit in any area.
We have different perspectives, but we already knew that.
mu'o mi'e xorxes