In a message dated 9/19/2001 3:34:02 PM Central Daylight Time, nicholas@uci.edu writes:
The first *is* entirely contextual, and Lojbab's pretty mcuh agreed that That is, the old standard difference between a quality or property and a relation? Why -- aside from Lojban/Loglan's habit of misusing terminology -- not just say this then? I don't understand what "{ka} is subcategorized by the gismu" means exactly, except that different features offunction are relevant to different predicates (at a guess). But thatdoesn't mean much more than that different predicates are different: {frica} and {cenba} look for certain values to be different, {dunli} looks for certain values to be the same, {banli} may not care about what the values are, just the function. <Ad hominem crap notwithstanding, what emerges from your subsequent reply to xod (God, but you don't make yourself clear) is that the gismu list should not be taken as saying {ni} is intersubstitutable with {ka} because they're the same thing semantically, but rather that {cenba} is polysemous, with cenba-1 taking a property, and cenba-2 taking a quantity.> No adhominem at all, unless you count the implicit stupidity of us all -- myself very definitely included -- for carrying on an argument for God knows how long about somethign that was not even true, namely that these gismu took only {ka} at some specified place and not {ni}. xorxes made (apparently -- he has yet to come back on that) a whole theory of two kinds of {ni} out of it and you and And seem to have bought the theory and I tookit seriously enough to try and figure out how it worked. All gone intwo seconds on the gismu list. No necessary polysemy either: something about x1 changes -- quality, quantity, whatever -- they are all the same (read the beginnings of calculus in the medieval treatises on the intension and remission of forms by such charmers as Richard Swineshead). <I was about to yell about xod's point, because I think that's making a bug into a feature. But if this is what you're saying (and even if it isn't), I might accept it. It still looks messy to me, though, particularly as it opens the door for things like {cenba le creka}: if you can put in a quantity, why not put in any atomic variable?> Yeah, changing the shirt is a metaphysical mess -- with {le}. Butnot such a problem with {lo}. <>Yes, people are not differences, but things differ in the values they >give as arguments to functions, which values may be people. Theydiffer, of >course, in the function, not the value of it. Well, yeah, which is why the {te frica} shouldn't be expressed extensionally. You're saying {le mamta be ce'u} is such a function. AllI can say is, to me it's still a sumti, so it can't express a relation or function, qua mapping, but only the result of the function. (It *involves* a relation, of course.) {le mamta be ce'u} doesn't have the extension ((Chelsea, Hillary), (Dubya, Babs)); it has the extension (Hillary, Babs). I want the former her, not the latter. So {leka makau mamta ce'u} is the only thing that makes sense to me here.> Who said that te frica was expressed extensionally, it is the function in which they differ, not the value of the function (they don't share thosevalues for one thing -- indeed that is the point in this case) and they differ in that function by having different values. Exactly as they differ in ka makau mamta ce'u by being true in different properties that fall under it, different values of it, say. If {le mamta be ce'u} doesn't contain <Chelsea, Hillary> and <W, Babs>, how do we get to the Hillary or the Babs from the Chelsea or the W? It sure looks like a function to me. If the extension of {le mamta be ce'u} is {Hillary, Babs,...} how can it the be just one of them? In short, if {leka makau mamta ce'u} makes any sense at all, then {le mamta be ce'u} makes the same sense, only simpler, since itinvolves only one step through functions, not two as the former does (makau to a particular mother, ce'u to a particular child). I don't expect xorxes to like it, but that doesn't change its status (being as good in Lojban as in English). I am a little more surprised that you don't like it. But that doesn't change its status either. this whole mess has been informative in several ways -- a nice construction (actually several) emerge, with a nice theory for them all and we are all reminded that none of us is an infallible expert in Lojban. Nor a pellucid writer of our views neither. |