Re: [lojban] Re: semantic primes

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 3/23/06, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> --- Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > And the thesis that a language can be
> > "completely defined" must
> > be taken as self-evident?
>
> No, it is a hypothesis being tested.  the test,
> of course, assumes that it is true and works on
> from there.  Should the tests ultimately fail,
> then the hypothesis would have to be abandoned.
> However, that part of the hypothesis has a good
> deal of prior probability, given the arguments
> above and our actual experience.

I guess we've identified the crux of the disagreement then.
As far as I can tell, that part of the hypothesis has very little
prior probability given our experience. I would tend to believe
it is false.

...
>  But, more strongly, it turns out that every
> concept eventually leads to some undefinable
> concepts (else some concepts would have infinte
> definitions, which, as noted above, are not
> definitions at all -- i.e., these are
> indefinable).

Or that every concept is itself undefinable in the strong sense.

> Thus, pooling these resources, we
> get a set of undefinable concepts in terms of
> which all the others are defined.

That's the main NSM hypothesis. Attractive, but highly unlikely
from my perspective.

> NSM's steps
> beyond this are to claim that this set is small
> (around 100, say), that it is the same in every
> language, and that this [a given list] is it.
> All these later steps are open to challenge as is
> the notion of a complete definition, but the
> heart of the argument remsins.

Well, without the notion of complete definition everything
else seems to fall apart.

> > X is bad =
> > X is the opposite of good
> >
> > How is that less of a fixed expression than the
> > expressions used
> > for "loves"?
>
> Well, if you can work out a case for English, I
> suppose the reason for rejecting it would be in
> some Austronesian language.

Ah, that's a good way out. :)

> But notice that your
> definition is not one of the canonical form and
> the NSMers insist that the sentential forms
> allowed are as much a part of the system as the
> concepts.

That's another good way out. I suppose the "canonical form" is
something too complicated to explain in a few lines?

> What would be the paradigm sentence
> for for OPPOSITE (or THE OPPOSITE OF)?

I'll leave that to the NSMers, assuming they want to include it
as a prime. (Don't non-primes require paradigm sentences too?)

mu'o mi'e xorxes