| In a message dated 3/2/2001 3:19:08 PM Central Standard Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: ><ta'enai cipra lo fancu no'u mu'a zo mlatu i ta'ecipra Sorry if it looks like I took it as a command; I didn't but just left out the uninteresting stuff before the verb (as in Lojban -- with varyingly awful results). (sorry about "the sentence" rather than "the use" there, a slip from the next item, which I then left out.) But {ta'e} is not about frequency but about intentional patterns, so this doesn't work as intended. {-roi} with appropriate quantifiers ("few" and "many," say) get to your point directly. (How could I forget about Lojban imperatives with {ko} constantly coming up?) <{le remei sarcu} was the pair of requirements that xod wanted as definition of a "meaningful sentence". What I understood him to be saying was that these requirements are observed less often than people think. I agree with you that it was not a very successful Lojban rendering.> Thanks. I don't think saying {le sarcu remei} would have helped much. And {zgana} is pretty clearly the wrong "observe" (I suppose he means these requirements are met) but where is the "often" and why is the thinker in the comparison place rather than the standard? In short, how did you get there from the actual word string presented? <But it is also necessary to try to express things we are interested in, otherwise the game soon becomes too boring.> Too true, but if you don't express them intelligibly then the game gets worse than boring for the reader -- and you don't really learn that much. <{cipnxirundi} is a fu'ivla, although it should have been {cipnrxirundi} to be a regular one. I meant "swallow". {lo cipnrxirundi pamei} = "a single swallow".> Sorry, I took it for "the first robin," another cliche. I am inclined to think that fu'ivla are part of the Lojban world we don't need yet and mostly can't handle (ta DA!) . And why not {xirundo} ala Linnaeus (I admit I had to look it up)? <Well, I would say it's a great success that you can figure out that much! > Oh, the discussion wasn't *that* bad. The repetition of {gerna flalu) on one side and {pilno} on the other gave that away (it helps they are words I know). The transitions were harder and I am still not too clear on how you got from my philosophic pabulum, "A sentence is meaningful just in case there is a test to determine whether it is true" to the langue-parole part (what gets tested, apparently). The pabulum, exciting as it was in the 20's and even in the 50's (and Carnap was still working with it in 1960), never really had much of a chance: when it got rid of theology, it got rid of theoretical physics, and when physics was gotten back in, theology came along. And then, as xorxes noted, there was the inevitable problem of all philosophic absolutes, the statement that embodied it (see above) is meaningless by the criterion it lays down, i.e., it is untestable. (Nagarjuna rules!) As I have noted before, anyone who doesn't like possible worlds (or possible languages -- they work as well) won't miss much. They give back most of what you put in them and nothing you don't, so the main use for them is figuring out what someone wants to put in -- often a rather useful piece of information, and one they may not give (correctly) if asked. Well, there is also planning experiments before you do them, to have the right size disaster control on hand. |