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Re: [lojban] Re: Oldbie Question from private mail.
John E Clifford wrote:
As one of the people who think that the basic
comparative form of the "adjectival" brivla is
one of the better features of Loglan (and
dropping it one of the flaws of Lojban), let me
add some notes here.
1. The decision to set up adjectives this way in
Loglan was based on studies of the _linguistic_
behavior of such words, how best to account for
that behavior at a fundamental level. Thus, much
of the stuff about theories in physics or
psychology or art were irrelevant (as they should
have been) to the basic concepts -- though they
play roles in related notions like "color" and
"weight" and the like.
But Loglan/Lojban has no "adjectives". So as a Nora puts it, if
linguistically we have to make blanu comparative, we also have to make
jubme comparative. There is nothing more adjectival about blanu than jubme.
2. The theory involved was primarily about
attributive usage ("blue dog"), secondarily about
predicative ("dog is blue") and hardly at all
about more abstract usage ("That color is blue"),
though that is ultimately accounted for as well.
In other words, it wasn't even designed as a predicate, but only for use
in tanru where the place structure seldom matters because almost no one
uses be/bei to specify modifiers.
The only other words that are brivla and were expected to be rarely used
as selbri were the metric prefixes. The culture words initially leaned
toward being attributive as well, but we had to choose a place structure
that would work as a standalone selbri. The same is true for the color
words.
"Scientific" color theories (for example) is
primarily about the last sort and is thus remote
from primary uses of color words.
You never gave this impression, since you as editor of TL allowed a huge
chunk of the first year of public discussion of Loglan to be esoteric
discussions of scientific and other aspects of color %^)
3. Within the primary use of color terms, the
main problem in Loglan was always "What goes in
the unfilled second place?" The general answer
was (and is) that unfilled places are treated as
particularly quantified variables, but that
clearly does not work for adjectives of this
sort, since anything (well, just about) is bluer
than something and, thus, blue.
Precisely. Which is why we had to throw out the comparative form, or
change the fundamental nature of Lojban ellipsis, introducing exceptions
(horrors!) or dividing brivla into arbitrary semantic categories (also
horrors!)
But, of course,
that was not the convention for adjectives,
though people frequently forgot -- or liked to
argue for the confusion it shed. In attributive
position, {blanu broda}, what was needed was a
broda blue than the normal (typical,...) broda --
which might not be very blue at all or might be
very blue indeed, depending. In predicative
position, the missing place was just again the
norm for whatever sort of thing the subject was
(though this could be open to a variety of
interpretations even if the species were
specified in naming the subject).
Unfortunately, the emergence of a paragon theory of semantics argued
against that. The comparison is not "more X than a standard" but "more
like the paragon X than some arbitrary allowed amount of difference".
5. At some point in Loglan days, JCB came up
with the "for a" locution (it may have been in
the original studies -- I have lost the
references on them) to make the case clearer: a
blue dog is a dog that is blue for a dog, not
simply a dog that is (in some absolute sense)
blue. Indeed, if we went by the scientific
stuff, a blue dog probably wouldn't be blue at
all, being nearer to several other standard chips
(or whatever test) than to blue. But, as dogs go
(they not ever getting very close to standard
blues, after all) it is blue.
But that format only works for attributive concepts. Otherwise we have
to deal with
le prenu cu jubme
being plausible meaning
That person is tablish for a person.
lojbab