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Re: [lojban] As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers]
At 10:13 AM 06/26/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
So, after all the rhetoric against JCB for taking all predications without
specific markers as merely potential, we end up in essentially the same
place.
I don't remember a lot of rhetoric on that subject, but no, I don't think
we ended at the same place. We ended at potentially the same place %^)
Seriously, a predication without specific marker is elliptical-tense. That
is not "merely potential" - it means that the tense is what context
demands. In the absence of context, a potential tense is a possible
interpretation, and some specific contexts may demand a potential tense as
interpretation. Isn't this what we were trying for in saying that
Loglan/Lojban was a tense-optional language?
I assume that our rhetoric for it is somewhat different (an
unspecified tense -- nevermind that tense is not an obligatory category in lb
-- may be located anywhere in the spatio-temporal-possible-imaginal world?).
OK, I think.
Well, at least this allows me to call a bottle a bottle even if it never does
in fact have anything in it, because it is the sort of thing that in many
worlds better run than this one would have something in it. What I can
presumably not say of my empty bottle is {ta ca botpi}.
No. Because as has been noted, your "empty" bottle has air or something in
it, so it is not the case, absent the use of a vacuum pump, that it is
actually without contents of any kind.
You cannot say "ta ca'a botpi zu'i"
It is therefore a little unclear what to do with a vacuum pump emptied
bottle, except maybe to use kunti as the main selbri and le botpi which
allows the not-quite veridical bottle because empty of amy contents.
This seems a little
odd, since when I say {ta botpi} I am probably NOT thinking of them worlds
over there and then but of the bottle I have in my hand here and now, that is
the untensed form is contextually focused to the present. (This was at the
heart of the rhetoric against JCB, as I recall, as well.)
We beat a lot of the JCB rap by changing zo'e into a true ellipsis - if
there is context that can supply a value of zo'e that makes the statement
true, then predication works.
lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org