Re: (no subject)

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 11:22 PM 02/26/2000 +0200, Adam Raizen wrote:
>la lojban cusku di'e
> > At 12:26 AM 02/24/2000 -0500, BestATN@aol.com wrote:
> > >How do you say in Lojban "I miss you" as a man might say to his wife when
> > >she's in hospital and he has to work?
> >
> > This sounds more attitudinal than anything one would claim with a 
> predicate
> > sentence.
>
>Anything you can say with an attitudinal can be made into a
>predicate claim. Sometimes it might be a little clumsy, but it still
>works.

Yes, but an attitudinal expresses emotion, whereas a predicate claim merely 
claims it. A man named John asserting predicatively that "I miss you" is 
expressing the identical semantics of a computer saying "la djan [misses] 
do. In other words there literally is no emotive content there. It is a 
claim, which may be true or it may be false. While no doubt people will 
manage to fake emotions in Lojban, the attitudinal is still such an 
expression and is beyond truth or falsehood - it is a speech act that 
actually conveys what it expresses while expressing it.

>This is one of the most interesting parts of Lojban, in my opinion,
>making up neat new words to enrich the language. The idea is to
>have the lujvo define themselves, and make up more words for the
>same idea, each with different connotations different from similar
>English words.

I would happy to see a lot more of this especially with people bothering to 
work out place structures as you did. But this does not replace the 
essential non-logical purity of emotional expression.

lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)