Re: [lojban] Letteral, letter words and symbols.

["Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>]

la pycyn cusku di'e

> a
>
> So, what is the situation in Lojban? The character just above the previous
> character is a letteral. The name of that character is, so it seems, a
> letteral word, in this case {abu}.

That's where we disagree. {abu} is not the name of the character,
it is a pronoun. At least in any grammatical Lojban text.

> When this character is written in some
> formulaic context is is read as {abu}.

Not within the grammar of Lojban, which in general does
not permit to easily read out any formulas. You have to
MEXify them if you want to read them using a grammatical
utterance.

> But this character cannot be written
> in a language context, for it is almost always going to lead to an 
> ambiguity
> -- mistaken for the word {a} which has more liberty of occurrence than the
> article in English and can occur almost anywhere that abu as a character
> could.

That's why the character "A" is a much more convenient abbreviation
for the word "abu" than the character "a".

(BTW, even in "character name mode", {abu} by itself is neither
"a" nor "A". It depends on whether or not the case shift has been
locked to uppercase (with ga'e) or not.)

> {la'e lu abu li'u cu lerfu} The referent of
> {abu} is a letteral (17.10.6, said to be correct, but whether true or just
> grammatical is unclear).

In some context, the pronoun {abu} can refer to the letteral.
But {abu} as a pronoun, not as a name. The distinction can be
blurred in Lojban thanks to the abundance of pronouns that allows
each letteral to have a different pronoun for itself.

> So, {abu blabi} might be about a particular
> occurrence of the letteral (on a neon sign, say) or it might be about 
> Alice,
> or someone else recently referred to with an a-description.

Yes. In English it would be "it's white", but Lojban gives more
clues as to what "it" might refer to than English, a particular
occurrence of the letteral being a strong candidate in some
context. (The particular occurrence might be "a", "A", or other
variants of the letteral.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes



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