[lojban] Re: Oldbie Question from private mail.

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

--- Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:

> You sent this only to me, so I am replying only
> to you.

Once I saw that you also went public, so did I,
so I expect this will all get duplicated again.
 
> John E Clifford wrote:
> 
> >Perfectly true but not relevant.  We can --
> and
> >do -- make a variety of subclasses of gismu
> >(hence brivla generally)
> >
> I did my damnedest to eliminate any such
> subclasses except where 
> absolutely necessary.

And failed inevitably.  subclasses linguistically
defined are an inherent part of language: even
Chinese with its minimal list of offical
grammatical classes has in fact several dozen
which are immediately recognized even by
nongrammarians bbased on their different
combinatorial potentials.  Lojban just fits that
pattern, as it must insofar as it can claim to 
be a language.
 
> >and this is just one of
> >them; calling it "adjectival" is merely a
> >convenience as it works to indicate the group
> to
> >English speakers -- which is almost all of
> use.
> >  
> >
> But of course the idea is to make the language
> culturally neutral, so a 
> usage that is convenient for English speakers
> is immediately suspect if 
> we can imagine any other usage.

But the  cultural neutrality line was JCB's best
joke.  He ended with a language more SAE than any
SAE language, an encapsulated bit of Aristotelian
metaphysics without even a real possibility of
expressing any other system (using formal logic
as a base almost guaranteed this result, of
course).  It was easy to imagine -- indeed point
to -- other ways of doing things but none of them
were ever even considered.  However, nothing
about the use of comparative bases is cultural
(it is not overt in English, for example) --
except calling them "adjectives,"  which, as
noted, is merely for convenience.  The argument
for the forms is intralinguistic, not cultural at
all (the argument works as well in Chinese and
Swahili as English).   The argument against them
was -- as it hjas usually been in these cases --
that it confused someone and was "too hard to
deal with."
 

> But there is another reason ...
> 
> All places of a predicate are equal.  Thus to
> say that the x1 place of  
> a brivla is adjectival in nature is a
> distraction, since we have to 
> consider all the places.

Though, of course, you used this distracting but
very convenient device until fairly late in the
game -- it saves a lot of explanation.

  A brivla means more
> than what its x1 place 
> means.  A comparative blue brivla thus means
> both bluer and less blue.

Sure, if x is bluer than y and y is less blue
than x; that is the logic of "-er than." 
Relevance?  What does this say about whether the
base forms are comparative in this way with x the
x1 object and y the x2 norm? does it speak at al
to the issues of how sentences are resolved
semantically, which is the source of the
suggestion?


> >Certainly not "only for tanru" although the
> tanru
> >usage was taken -- on interesting linguistic
> >grounds -- as being primary.
> >
> A logician who says that predicates are not
> primary in a logical language???

I didn't say that: I said that in a language
(which formal logic is not in any general
sense)predicates in attributive position are
primary (and the formal language is stuck with
the serious problem of figuring how to deal with
them  from its ppredicative-only position.  It
would have an easier time explaining the
predicative in terms of the attributive, but that
is not the way the grammar grew in logic.)

> >  The other usage was
> >derivative.  And, it should be noted, in the
> >tanru position at the appropriate level the
> >second place was functional, even if it was
> lost
> >in later developments.
> >  
> >
> If it was really functional then we would be
> able to say what goes into 
> the x2 of blanu to make the basic claim that
> something is "blue". 

Well, the point is exactly (see above) that the
claim that something is blue is NOT basic; what
is basic is that it is a blue something.

> (And 
> of course we still are ignoring the science
> that says that most colors, 
> being derived by perception, depend on the
> observer, the observing 
> conditions, background etc.)

Of course, we do not tell colors by science; at
best we hope tht science can explain why we tell
the colors we do.  We often fail in this, since
the concommitance between the factors that
science  isolates and the colors we see is not
very good -- possibly less than fifty percent
correlations.  Science has its place, but not in
seeing colors, etc.  But again this is largely
irrelevant since the issue is the grammar of
these expressions and their interactive semantics
and science enters not at all into this.
 

> 
> >The move to standalone selbri was accompanied
> --
> >from the present point of view -- by a
> detachment
> >from the basic perceptual usage of the terms
> in
> >favor of a more abstract notion.  this is not
> a
> >simple change of role, then, but pushing some
> >furter agenda. 
> >
> 
> Yes - the agenda of making the language a
> "predicate" language.

Say what?  It could hardly be a more predicate
language (well, we could get rid of cmavo, I
suppose).  What have you built into the notion of
"predicate language"?  Since predicates have
different numbers of places and since the places
of different predicates are characterized in
different ways (necessarily, given the semantics
of the various concepts), there are bound to be a
variety of subclasses of predicates, not all on a
level (Again, this is the nature of language
here: there are relations of various sizes and
between things of various types and these are
inescapable if we are going to say even a small
fraction of what we have to say.  None of this
has anything to do with the issue however.)
 
> >(I note, by the way, that even in
> >the (old) official list {blanu} is marked as a
> >color adjective -- apparently the 
> >classification's value has been recognized
> fairly
> >continuously.)
> >  
> >
> The English definitions in the gismu list have
> always been inherently 
> limited by the nature of the English language
> and need of defining 
> predicates for English-speakers.  "blue" in
> English is also a verb (what 
> "bluing" does) and it is a non-color adjective
> (meaning "sad", or 
> "indecent" or a bunch of other things). 
> m-w.com even lists several noun 
> meanings.  Beinmg specific about what the word
> means is a good thing. 

Andthis is different from what I was suggesting
how?  It is convenient and clarifying device
which saves a lot of writing -- but is ultimately
eliminable when the need arises. 
> 
> >
> >Yes, as I noted.  The point is that the
> ellipsis
> >rules were always arbitrary and the general
> rule
> >is regularly violated in special cases --
> often
> >on a word-by-word basis rather than by
> classes. 
> >To have lost a fundamental insight of this
> sort
> >for a specious uniformity does seem to me to
> have
> >been a  mistake (as I argued at the time,
> >indeed).
> >  
> >
> No fundamental insight has been lost, since it
> is trivial to make a 
> brivla that has the place structure of  TLI's
> blanu.
But that loses the insight that the comparative
form is linguistically (and perhaps
psychologically) basic -- the only interesting
insight involved.
  
> >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".
> >  
> >
> >
> >Paragon theory hardly "emerged, " having been
> >around for about 2000 years and regularly
> refuted
> >by experience. 
> >
> I'm referring to the results of the Kay/Kempton
> studies which was an 
> experiment that as I understood it supported
> the paragon theory.  But 
> what I meant was that having multiple views on
> what  "blue" meant 
> linguistically - comparative/paragon/scientific
> set of frequencies, etc. 
> It seemed "metaphysically parsimonious" not to
> assume that one of the 
> views as more fundamental than any other. 
> That's why our solution for 
> blanu was to DROP places rather than add
> "standard" and "observer" and 
> "conditions"

Well, of course this has nothing to do with
metaphysics even in the peculiar Loglan/Lojban
sense.  As I recall the studies you site they
were the old sorting blocks type, not
particularly linguistic at all.  And, as noted,
they failed to account for the clear linguistic
processes that run counter to their "findings"
(some thirty years ago most of these perceptual
experiments were revealed to be question begging,
having built the intended results into the
experimental design.  I don't know whether your
case was among those analyzed, but the results
suggest that it was -- like the other similar
ones).
  
> >In any case, it dealt with a
> >different situation that was met with in the
> >underlying linguistic logic of the base
> >comparison model.  Paragon thoey has bnever
> been
> >able to explain, for example, how blue dogs
> are
> >blue, since they paragonically are not.
> >  
> >
> They are presumably more like a paragon of a
> "blue dog" than a "non-blue 
> dog".

Well, yes, it may be that blue dogs are more like
paragon blue dogs, but most suvch theories will
analyze paragon blue dogs into (paragon?) dogs
and paragon blue and then the whole fails again. 
Or else we are back to taking attributive usage
as primary.

  And if a "blue dog" is not in fact blue,
> that is not because the 
> paragon of blue is invalid, but the paragon of
> "dog" takes preeminence 
> of the the modifier, which in fact is something
> else JCB pronounced 
> somewhere along the way.

If a paragon blue is a questionable concept, a
paragon dog is far and away more so (the
correlation is nearer to zero that 50% there), so
this hardly seems a solution. 
> >  
> >
> >>>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.
> >>>
> If so, then in Lojban it shouldn't be called a
> "blue dog" but rather 
> whatever other standard chip applies.


Wrong by your own account : blue is not defined
in Lojban by a chip or even a paragon but is left
unexplained as such, so that any theory can be
introduced. 
> 
> >>>(they not ever getting very close to
> standard
> >>>blues, after all) it is blue.
> >>>      
> >>>
> It is closer to the paragon of a blue dog than
> it is to the paragon of a 
> red dog.

Not necessarily, since, among other things, there
is no reason to think that either of these things
exists (and some reasons to think they do not).

All of this is pretty much beside the point
anyhow.  My purpose was not to argue that we
should go back to the old way, just to try and
make the old way seem a bit more sensible that it
was be presented as in the discussion.  And, of
course, to make again the point that Lojban has
often changed things for not very sensible -- or
defensible -- reasons.