Jorge Llambías wrote:
On 1/5/06, Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:An utterance that includes a zoi quote is Lojban utterance. A zoi quote thus "borrows" the foreign text for use in a Lojban utterance.But a quoted word is mentioned, not used in the relevant sense. For example, if I say in English "What does "casa" mean in Spanish?" I'm mentioning the Spanish word "casa", but I'm not borrowing it. If I say "I went into the casa", then I'm using (borrowing) it.
I went into the room labeled "hjgngh".has borrowed "hjgngh" into English temporarily surely as much as "casa" was borrowed in your example.
*In particular*, the insight I had was that JCB's decade-long quest for a way to borrow Linnean binomials into TLI Loglan so as to make them "Loglan" was a waste of effort, when we had the tools for quoting non-Loglan/Lojban text strings. In English, we can clearly borrow Linneans without modifying them: "The human colon is infested with Escherichia coli". Chinese apparently does the same, and so a scientific Chinese text will have a string of Chinese characters with embedded Roman alphabet strings. There simply is no need to Lojbanize such text strings in order to borrow them - all we need is a way to mark and delimit them so that they don't foul up audiovisual isomorphism, and so that their grammatical role is unambiguously determinate. And we had such a means with ZOI quotes. Thus I invited la'o for quoting Type I borrowings, specifically for Linnean binomials, but recognizing that it also solved the problem of Lojbanizing other single-use borrowings that lose their recognizability when Lojbanized.
Since zoi quotes and la'o quotes take the same contents, if a string can be borrowed using la'o, it can be called a "borrowing". The string's function in a zoi quote is not as a borrowing but as a foreign string; in a la'o quote, it is as a borrowing. But it is the same string either way, so we can label the string as-such a "borrowing" in the potential, time-free, sense that we can label anything in Lojban.
I agree that in the sentence 'The alien said "hhigutfuyfh;kkhjlgg"', that the text string is not borrowed into English, but Lojban's grammar allows more than mere quoting of alien text strings - it allows them to be used in all the ways that a Lojban sumti or cmene can be used (depending on whether quoted with zoi or la'o, and even a zoi quote can be used in other roles than pure quote, using "me" or mex cmavo).
If we disagree on the terminology for this, I think we are rambling in the semantics of English-language "borrow" in a not-especially-useful way, but that is the sense in which >I< labeled them 'Type I "borrowings"'. I have no problem with calling la'o quotes "borrowing" and zoi quotes "quoting" if it eases the dispute, but that terminology reflects the Lojban words attached to the string and are not a categorization of the string itself, *except* in the Lojban context in which it is being used. Thus it is at most a question whether to label based on function or form.
lojbab