Re: [lojban] Re: xorlo podcast

[John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>]

--- Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.)

Well, you probably have an advantage on me for
doing history, since a large part of my hard
drive that Linux took out was my records for
those earlier discussions.  Not that it actually
matters in the long run whether it was as
accepted or used as I remember.  the discussions
on which it was based and the formulations of are
as they were presented at various times in our
more recent discussions -- where it was described
as the previous standard in various ways  and was
clearly not CLL. And, of course, the whole is
laid out in the cited wiki page.

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."

Well, that was early times and much discussion
has flowed under the dam.  But it is nice to see
my description of it as murky metaphysics
verified.
 
> > 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.

Well, I will not cite personal conversations, but
they did leave me with the impression that you
were now falling back to the smaller "species"
interpretation.  Even that was a bit hard to get
out of the official description but was a
possibility, but the Mr.Mr. interp is harder
still.  And -- at least in the version that was
most recently going round -- it does prevent the
carefully constructed system that allowed {lo}
finally to be workable in at least some kind of
logic. 
 
> >  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.

Yes, but it does seem to me that a logical
language has some some responsibility to be
logical and so far the Mr.Mr notion and gavagai
don't make it (and species does only at great cost).