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Re: [lojban] Bringing it about that

At 05:57 PM 04/14/2000 -0700, Jorge Llambias wrote:

> >John IS an event by many definitions
>
>Yes and if his mere existence motivates something, that would seem
>acceptable in x1.

Why is John, as an event, merely his existence? Isn't John
the sum of all of his actions and properties, including
but not limited to his existence? Is {le nu la djan zasti}
such a special event that it gets to be named John all
by itself?
You can name any event "John", but that happens to be an event more likely to be named "John" zo'o. 


>I think that the important point in flagging the place as an event is to
>get people to think about what the real motive is before making the claim,
>which usually is not just "John".

But the point was that it is just as arbitrary to stop
at any level of abstraction as it would be to stop at John.
What is it that motivates you to hit John? Him? His laughing?
The annoyance of his laughing? etc. etc. Yes, any or all
of them.
I agree that it is arbitrary. You communicate causality to the level you choose. Did John kill George, or John shooting a gun, or the bullet piercing George's heart, or George massively bleeding through a wound, or ... All are causes of George's death. 


>I think people are
>still prone to thinking two-placedly (there ought to be a good ten-dollar
>Latinate word for that!  A 10-rupnu Lojban word is easy, of course).

What is the dekrupnu Lojban word, then? Is it really so easy?


relterbrisku, pei


Also, what would be a good lujvo for "prone":

x1 is prone/has a tendency/inclination/proclivity/predisposition
to be/do x2;


jinzi, ckaji (fadykai), fadytra all seem to cover some aspects of this.


>Indeed, I think the
>tendency is the other way, towards overly analytical semantics, especially
>as compared to the poetic lujvo that Michael Helsem used to coin (and may
>still, since I never have time to read his writings, sorry Michael).

How can the tendency be away from Michael when Michael is the
most prolific author we have now, and has been for quite a
while? You must be thinking of the tendency of commentators
rather than the tendency of actual usage.
One person, however prolific, does not make a trend unless his patterns are followed, by others. As it is, we have your experiments to show that few people actually read all-Lojban writings, so his writings are not nearly as normative as dictionary entries at this point. The norm amongst the rest of the community is to expect/rely on the dikyjvo conventions in the Book being used, and that is what people seem to expect in analyzing place structures (e.g. the recent attempt to analyze a group of lujvo). I somehow doubt that Michael could be so prolific if he did such analysis for each new word he used. 

lojbab
----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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