Re: Use and abuse of sets

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

la lojbab cusku di'e

> >of course, because {la xorxes} is not {le xadni be la xorxes}.
>
>Is your body not named that? %^) la xorxes is not a uniquely referential 
>tag.

I don't think I ever gave my body a name. Are you saying
that {la lojbab xadni la lojbab} is true?

>Cowan put this better than I did - the quantities of water that comprise a
>mass of water are not a unique division of the mass.  So if you say "le
>djacu" referring to those members, it is ambiguous which members these are.

Yes, just as ambiguous as for the members of {le'i djacu},
no more no less.

>Well now that you have this mass, how many members does this mass have?

The mass {lei ci djacu} has as many members as the set
{le'i ci djacu}, three.

> > >Or shall we say that any possible manifestation of the mass
> > >properties is a putative member.
> >
> >I wouldn't say that.
>
>I don't know how to argue this with you.  It is definitional.

I don't understand how it can be. One of the properties
of {lei ci djacu} might be that it weighs 2kg. Now it would
be absurd to claim that anything weighing 2kg is a member of
{lei ci djacu}, so any possible manifestation of the mass
properties is not a putative member.

>I'm not meaning to be insulting.  When talking about knowing what the
>language is or will be, I have my linguist hat on, and look at what fluent
>speakers do.

Ok, then there is nothing you can say about it.

When I talk about what the language is or will be I am simply
giving my subjective impressions from what experience I have had
and from looking at what other non-fluent speakers are doing.
I am also trying to explain why I do some of the things I do
with it (like not using sets) in the hopes that others will
be convinced by my arguments and follow my usage. My sense
of aesthetics calls for the language to be as simple as possible
while remaining as clear, unambiguous and easy to use as possible.
I think sets make a distinction that doesn't help to disambiguate
anything, so I don't use them.

>  A lot of people who
>post in Lojban know only a subset of the language and therefore cannot
>possibly have the flexibility to use any or all parts of the language
>equally should the occasion arise when one of the more obscure parts is 
>useful.

I don't know how much I agree with that. Some people learn
the language in bits and pieces, that's true. Others, like
me, enjoy looking at the whole thing. The nice thing about
Lojban is that you can do this fairly easily, the whole
grammar is written in only two pages in the E-BNF version!
Of course I don't remember all the vocabulary, but I do have
a fairly thorough knowledge of the grammar, and when I have
doubts about some detail I know exactly where to look to
find the answer. I think this simplicity is one of Lojban's
greatest assets, so I dislike the "features" that detract from
that.

> > > > What language
> > > >has a specialized grammar for technical fields?
> > >
> >I meant human language, like Lojban.
>
>Mathematics is a human language.

So written mathematics may follow its own rules. Yet
when you read it in English you use regular English
grammar, when you read it in Spanish you use regular
Spanish grammar, and when you read it in Lojban you
can also use regular Lojban grammar. The special grammar
structures that Lojban has for this kind of thing
(which is not even needed, since the rest of the language
is as adequate as any other language to read maths)
is what I find odd.

>Some of the fanciness of text context resetting with ki and multiple ni'o
>and no'i was  invented with an eye to translating the stories within
>stories within stories of Burton's Arabian Nights.  The grammar of such
>writing will not be the same as that of an IRC chat.  Until something like
>that is written or translated, the potential won't be realized.

I always found the parts of Lojban that have to do with
typography and paragraphing a bit strange too. At least
they are more spread out throughout the grammar, so they
are not as noticeable as the MEX part. I'm not really
consistent in doing this yet, but I tend to use {ni'o}
and  {no'i} as if they were part of selmaho UI, thus
for example starting paragraphs with {i ni'o} instead of
bare {ni'o}. This is still grammatical, but the hope here
is to simplify all that paragraph structuring, which I
don't think I would be able to follow even in a written
text, much less in speech. Semaho LAU and all the shifts
in selmaho BY are other strange beasts, as if typography
had anything to do with grammar. Again hopefully they
will be forgotten with time, and when a Lojban grammarian
is describing the Lojban grammar in the year 2073 maybe
it will just appear in a footnote as an obscure archaism.

>It may be that no one person will know all of the language.  The same is
>likely of English.

I don't know about knowing all the language, obviously
nobody will know all the vocabulary. But the nice thing
about Lojban is that knowing all of the grammar is very
easy, whereas in English there isn't a fully defined
grammar to know. Either that or, by definition,
any competent speaker knows the full grammar.

co'o mi'e xorxes

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com