[lojban] Re: .aunai and .a'unai

[Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 5/5/05, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> At this point there seems to be agreement that
> these attitudinals at least (but surely most ot
> the rest too) need some more work.  There is less
> agreement about what should happen in these
> cases.

I can certainly see that there would be many benefits by having more
thorough definitions of these words available. But are you suggesting
that changing/remapping these words to be more useful might be
possible? I'm not sure exactly what changes you're suggesting here.

> We
> clearly do need a way to express wishes of the
> impersonal sort (i.e., not requests or
> suggestions directed at agents) and there does
> not seem to be a place for them.

I'm at a loss as to what an "impersonal wish" would look like. When I
wish for something (or desire it) what I wish is for the world to be
in a certain, different state. I don't see how you can remove my own
personal element out of this. I think that whether the differences in
my hypothetical wish-world involve people or non-personal facts is
irrelevant. One word suffices to serve both purposes, and it seems to
me that {au} is that word.

> But the other
> suggestions also seem to be useful things to have
> and are not covered in any obvious way.
> Using {a'u} for interest in the ordinary sense
> does not fit the pattern very well (no neutral
> ground in this category, repulsion is not the
> opposite, etc.), though, again, this is a notion
> that deserves some mark.  The {a'unai} example
> offered suggests that {a'u} ought to be
> "attractive" or some such -- again a needed but
> perhaps unavailable form (though something like
> {ui} is close in some cases.

Contrary to my original post (I'm not sure exactly how this happened
since then) I can see the logic in "repulsion" being the opposite of
interest. It seems to me that "interest" in X is when thinking
about/doing X is pleasurable or entertaining, which might take on some
of the sense of "attractive" as well. The opposite by this definition
would be when thinking about/doing X is unpleasurable, or repulsive.

And what is this about having no neutral ground? {a'ucu'i} would mean
a lack of interest, but not an outright repulsion. I can see this as a
single, logical scale, as I've defined it. I suppose the danger here
is that I'm extrapolating considerably from the available definitions,
and that this extrapolation will be inconsistent from person to person
(even, as in my case, from day to day) unless a more complete
definition is established somewhere.

Does {a'u} really break out of the pattern then? I'm not seeing that.

> It should also be
> noted that some of the attitudes which there are
> words to express seems to be ones that we do not
> express (are not really attitudes, maybe):
> cowardice, for example, or competence.  So there
> is room for a rearrangement of terms to be more
> inclusive and more unified.  Not a real
> possibility, of course.

I'm sure that many things in lojban could benefit from redoing. But
even a mostly-broken system, with gaps and redundancies and odd
attitudinal scales that are really two scales conflated, still has the
potential to be very useful. And after all, we can never really
understand the weaknesses of a system until we've become intimately
familiar with that system.

I think the definitions/examples given in the BPFK sections are a
really good start to make the attitudinals less ambiguous to
beginners. The only thing I'd change (with my limited knowledge) is
the use of "reluctance" as the gloss for the opposite of "desire".
Unfortunately, I can't think of a better gloss for what amounts in
Jorge's examples to some sort of "reverse-wish" or "un-desire".

By the way, is it really the best way in Lojban to express a
"reverse-wish" to do so with {aunai}, {a'onai}, and friends? In most
natural languages the construction is customarily shifted to put the
negative in the predication, like "I wish you were never born." and
such. Is it more lojbanic to say {.aunai pu do jbena} or something?
(Is the tense necessary here? It seemed to me it'd be a bit confusing
without it.)

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)