| <Sigh!> Irony is dead. The point of the "proposal" was to be so absurd that everyone would say "Wait! Why clutter up everything that is working fine just to feel comfortable about one case that is just like all the rest but gives me the creepies" and we could go on about the business. Now we have someone taking the "suggestion" seriously and rejecting it across the board because it doesn't look grammatical (though it is), another person noting that it is grammatical but rejecting it because (well, I'm not exacrly sure, but mainly I think) because it ain't the way we used to do it (though the one case has not been done before). And finally someone (or both of these two, actually) proposing setting the one caseout specially again (thereby missing the whole point -- again) to be treated in Mex. So, all I can do is recommend treating all functions, except {ka}, which already has a special mark, in MEX. Which ain't the way we used to do it but is at least consistent and coherent. Is old {ka} now{na'u du'u} or {du'u na'u}? I think it may make a difference in dealing with indirect questions, but either is so ugly it hardly matters.
&: <> One of the virtues elsewhere has been that the form marked thesort of > thing that came out as values {du'u} and propositions, {ni} and qunatities, > and so on. I can see the force of this argument and the virtue of keeping it in mind when seeking ways to refer to functions that, when applied, yield sumti.> Most of these critters yield sumti in their regular use; this is not a special case. <1. Lojban has no way to express the mother-of function applied to an argument. When I said this before, you replied: > <I > applied function rather than only as a predicate. E.g. if *{mamta la > djan} functioned as a sumti that referred to the mother of John. That > seems to be how you conceive of {le mamta be la djan}, but really that > means "x is such that it is nonveridically said to be the case that x > mamta la djan", where x is not bound by a quantifier.> > > Well, as you are wont to say, that *is* how Lojban uses {mamta} asan > applied function. That role may not follow strictly from the literal > meaning of the terms but it is a role that the _expression_ plays --look > at a clear case like {le sumji be le re li mu}. (I would argue that "is > non-veridically said to be" is suspect loading, "that the speaker is using" > is safer, for the speaker may use it just because it is the veridical thing > to say -- and usually does, byt the way). "le sumji" is a poor choice of gadri, though I concede that it is hallowed by usage. At any rate, we seem to agree that Lojban has no way to express the mother-of function applied to an argument, and that in those circumstances where we would use a way to express the mother-of function applied to an argument, if we had such a way, we instead use "le mamta be" (or similar with some other gadri).> As I have said -- while conceding taht {le} is saddled with all kinds of problems, but pointing to its traditonal usage -- {le mamta be ...} is exactly how Lojban deals with the mother-of function applied to an argument. The problem is to find a way to talk about the mother-of function allby itself, as we talk about the is-big function or the size function so easily. We also want to do it in a way that parallels these othre cases, since they occur in parallel situations (pur storeies about W and Jeb and Chelsea, for the most part, so far). <2. Lojban's prime exemplars of functions are its mex operators, andLojban provides a way to convert a selbri to operator: {na'u mamta}. (I don't see that we need {na'u mamta (be?) ce'u}.)> Actually, these have almost never been used and are certainly a lot less common than {ce'u} functions built from ordinary predicates <3. There seems to be no easy way to convert an operator to a sumti.Does {li} tolerate an operandless operator as complement -- {li na'u mamta}? Otherwise, {li ni'e nu'a na'u mamta} converts from operator to sumti.> {li} is jsut the sort of thing that I was afraid might happen with Lojbab's suggestion, though I am happy to see that Lojbab doesn't accept it. For the final case you give, I'm not sure you need {ni'e}, then the {nu'a na'u} cancel out and the {li} , bing inappropriate, is relaced by {le} to get what we started with in the friest place {le mamta}. And FarmerBrown is geting angry with all the troops gallumphing in his barnyard. <4. The applied function could be expressed as {li na'u mamta mo'e la djan}.> Or, in a rare flash of sanity, {le mamta be la djan}. lojbab: <So any time you want formal _expression_ and it isn't a simple predicate or one of the ornamentations thereof that we designed into the language, Mex is the way to go - or at least we hope so.> Of course, I am inclined to say that this is just one of those ornamentations designed into the langauge and point to all the cases where it is soused, wondering why it cannot be used in this most basic place. <>1. Lojban has no way to express the mother-of function applied to an argument. This is notationally y=mother(x) correct? If so, then it is precisely mekso, and you can convert the predicate with ce'u as a single thing, or convert all the pieces to an Polish notation _expression_ with "mamta" as the operator and 1 operand for the x2 (this loses the number-of-arguments semantics info since it is purely notational and the functions can have arbitrary numbers of arguments)> I'd like to see the Lojban here, the shifting this and calling it that described has left me in a dither about just what I should actually SAY. <>3. There seems to be no easy way to convert an operator to a sumti. You can convert ANYTHING in Mex. You probably want to use me'o and leave the operands unfilled.> Well, not, not {me'o na'u mamta}, since that is just the _expression_; rather {la'e me'o na'u mamta}. Will someone please tell me why all thistrouble for this particular issue when all the corresponding ones, with every other kind of value, are dealt with just by putting {ce'u} in where the arguments go. |