In a message dated 3/3/2002 8:55:20 PM Central Standard Time, jjllambias@hotmail.com writes:The name of that character is, so it seems, a Read the whole piece and note the "as it seems." But also note the cases cited various places where {abu} is used clearly as a name -- as historically it was. <>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.> Read the whole piece. In context it needs {me'o} to set that context, but the reqding is still {abu}. <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.)> The Lojban tradition is not to use abbreviations at all -- and not to use capital letters except for emphasis -- so this particular practice is very unLojbanic, not to mention mileading. {abu} will be either "a" or "A" depending on whether the shift is on or not, so it is always either one or the other. <>{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.> While it is possible to twist a case to make this look plausible, I doubt it is worth the effort. In none of the cases cited (and certainly not in spelling) is there an antecedent occurrence of some obvious reference to a character "a" that enables the pronoun reference to work. <>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.)> Read the whole paper; this passage is taken from a hypothesis contrary-to-fact, though I think that your response is wrongheaded and as irresponsible as your use of the out of context quotation. |