Re: [lojban] Re: Duty, promice etc...

[Jim Carter <jimc@math.ucla.edu>]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2007, Cyril Slobin wrote:

> What I really try to say is "You promise is silly". What does it mean?
> "The action you are promised to do is silly"? "The event that you have
> given a promise is silly"? "The event that you are keeping to fulfil
> you promise is silly"? Nothing of this in particular and all of this
> at once.

I can't resist this thread...  "I promise to jump off Lover's Leap if you 
don't marry me".  If the response were "Your promise is silly", it could 
reasonably be interpreted in all of the ways Cyril mentioned:

"Jumping off Lover's Leap is silly" (but a careful speaker would say just 
that, not using "your promise" to represent the event promised).

"Promising to jump off the cliff is silly".  That's the best 
interpretation.

"Promising that, and then actually doing it, is even more silly".

In Lojban, when a variant isn't specified explicitly all choices are 
possible.  However, in the grammar of the sentence (your promise is silly), 
the predicate "silly" is applied to its first argument "your promise", and 
I think this has to be interpreted exclusively as "the event of you 
promising to jump off the cliff".  I don't think it should be 
considered exemplary language behavior to add or subtract layers of 
grammar to give "you abstractly jump off the cliff" or "you actually jumped 
off the cliff".  Sloppy or pragmatic language behavior, yes, people say 
that, but I don't go with the "language as she is spoke" crowd.  We may 
have to do our best to understand garbage on input, but we should do our 
best to produce clean output.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
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