Fwd: da blanu de

[Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group <lojbab@lojban.org>]

>Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 11:05:12 -0500 (CDT)
>To: lojbab@lojban.org
>From: John Clifford <sjepark@umslvma.umsl.edu>
>Subject: da blanu de
>
>>>From my occasional drops-in on Lojban list (MyGAWD are they on the second
>place of nitcu again/still?!)I see that things are stuck in the same cycling
>rut.  But I see one historical question arising anew (i.e., I haven't seen
>it for several years) namely, why Loglan blanu was two-placed.  So, because
>i actually liked that feature and the related one, I offer a recap:
>The background is a linguistic/philosophic discussion in the late 60's about
>semantic primes.  Two features of this slid into Loglan at the time: that
>all predicates were inherently potential, becoming actualized only in
>context (borrowed from Quine eventually, I think -- or at least blamed on
>him) and that all "absolute" terms were actually relative.  It was not clear
>to what they were relative and trying to work this out was what led to
>Lojban dropping this feature (that and the fact that you and John did not
>like it) (The potential meaning was dropped even in Instiloglan in practice
>at least because no one could figure out how to tell when the context had
>actualized a term and when not.) But the cases underlying the original
>comparative blanu remain to be dealt with, e.g, that a blue house is usually
>much less blue than a blue sky or a blue sapphire but more so than a blue
>baby and so on.  The classics are things like tall dwarfs and short giants
>(OK, small elephants and enormous ants).  The skipped second place was
>normally taken to be the typical of the named class of the first term: a
>tall dwarf was (quite correctly) one taller than the typical dwarf, and so
>on.  But this came in conflict with the usual elision variable "something,"
>leaving everything blanu apparently (well, bluer than SOMEthing).
>The new "by standard..." does not solve that problem, nor does appeal to
>general paradigm cases.  But people seem to get by just by using the rule
>they use in English (or whatever), which is what the original insight was an
>attempt to make explicit.
>pc

----
lojbab                     ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS***           lojbab@lojban.org
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