Re: More proverbs, and a digression on badness

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

>Incidentally, I'm not so sure about the note on "xlali" in the
>gi'uste:
>
>xlali [ xla ] bad ; 'mal-' 
>x1 is bad for x2 by standard x3; x1 is poor/unacceptable to x2 
>[be careful to distinguish between a bad/unacceptable event, 
>and a bad/unacceptable agent: x1 does poorly (= lenu ko'a gasnu cu
>xlali and not normally ko'a xlali)]; (cf. palci, mabla, xamgu,
>betri) 

>This seems to carry over into Lojban the natlang fallacy of
>distinguishing between "be" and "do".  
>
>   la djan xlali 
>
>means that John is bad for some person by some standard, which is
>the same as John doing something which has a bad effect on some
>person, which is the same as "le nu la djan. gasnu cu xlali", unless
>you mean that the fact that John exists is in and of itself harmful,
>or that there is some transcendent metaphysical quality of badness
>which John possesses, in which latter case a different word would be
>appropriate (probably "palci").  

You are correct - we DON'T want to carry over the natural language
fallacy, and therefore, most cases of "la djan. xlali" should
be "tu'a la djan. xlali".  That is the point I was trying to make with
the note, which of course was written before sumti raising was well
understood.  I was sensitive to the issue in the case of xlali because
"basic parenting" includes teaching the kids that "doing bad" has
consequences, but that even "good kids" sometimes "do bad".  Now it isn't
entirely clear how one would translate "good kids" in this example, but
it seems that there could be some other scale besides good/evil
involved here, in which case it would presyumably involve xamgu/xlali.

lojbab