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Re: [lojban] RE:not only

At 05:11 PM 04/19/2001 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:

Which few clever things were lost?


The best was the one that took all primary adjectives as fundamentally
comparatives. Thus, for example, {blanu} (one of the rare words that survived
in shape) meant "x1 is bluer than x2."  That made it easier to explain why a
blue house (bluer than a typical house) was so much less blue than a blue
bluebell (bluer than a typical bluebell).  It also led to endless arguments
to the effect that, if we left the second place out, it was filled by a bound
variable and thus everything was blue, since bluer than something.  The
response was -- within Loglan -- to say that that was not how to fill that
space but rather with the contextually appropriate form, but that turned out
to be too difficult for Loglanists to figure out.
This is not quite why we changed it, though these arguments entered into it. One reason was a realization from prototype theory that word meanings (especially of colors) simply are NOT comparative to a typical in nature, but rather reflect closeness to an archtypical or prototypical concept of blue. Thus "blue" is "less non-blue than any non-blue object, or something to that effect, though even this formulation may break down at the borders between colors.
Nora also had strong distaste for what is now "na se blanu", the negated converse, which IIRC JCB attached special meaning to. 

lojbab




 So, when we got to Lojban,
that whole pattern (which was based on very good research, by the way, into
what happens in ordinary languages) was dropped.  There was some talk about
replacing the comparison with a "to observer" or "by standard" which could
then be filled in appropriately in much the same way as the comparisons would
("in comparison to a typical house" would make a good standard), but that was
too hard, too -- and I suppose soemone could claim that there is *some*
standard by which a screaming red house is blue.  So, we got just the flat
positive forms.
There weren't a lot of others and I can't remember any good ones just now.
If they come to me, I'll drop them into the pipe.
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--
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