Re: [lojban] Re: {le} in xorlo

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

You lie down with a logical language, you wake up with logicians.  Roshi Carnap 
(and linguists too)

The good news is that logicians are totally uninterested in the vast majority (and it is vast -and growing; Hell, the minority is vast) of cmavo. They have nothing to do with logic or do so only at the level of speech acts, a remote interest.  Of the ones they are interested in, most are dismissed as the results of bad design (unspecified, mainly "Surely, there is a better way to do this"): the plethora or right-hand-end markers and connectives that mean the same thing, for outstanding examples. Or the various attempts at pronouns to replace variable.

But they are concerned about the gadri. descriptors.  So, let me try again to sort out the logics involved here (short of &'s comment about the placement of quantifiers, which is, as it happens, quite correct but confusing outside semantics).  I'm not sure why this is so hard, since nothing seems to have changed much, aside from plural reference theory (thank you, xorxes!). (I still have this haunting feeling that that there is a trap here somewhere, but none of my sticks have sprung it.)  e and o differ in that e merely points to some thing, hoping that others will get the right things by using the attached predicate (it helps,of course, if the things pointed to actually satisfy that predicate and are , furthermore, the most salient such in the situation, but it is useful for cases of disguise and ridicule: the end of an early Mickey Spillane -- or The Crying Game -- when the woman is a man) while o picks out by the predicate the appropriate things in
 the situation.  The bare (no -i) forms refer to the things themselves acting collectively.  The -i forms refer the L-set with the same things as its members and the set then acts like the members collectively (I take it that 'gunma' and "mass" are crude terms for the more precise L-sets).  The logics of things acting collectively and collections of things acting are identical, but the language is different.  In particular, external quantifiers the former are partitive and isolating 're lo broda' is two of the brodas acting individually, while on the latter, the result is multiplicative: 're loi broda' is two sets of brodas, still acting as units. Fractional quantification brings them a little closer: 'pire lo broda' would be a fifth of the original brodas, still acting together (I think, but I would welcome correction here)  and 'pire loi broda' would be a subgroup a fifth the original size but still acting as a unit.  Of course, when the referent is a
 single thing, the difference disappears (a singleton L-set is identical to its member). (And so, yes, they work pretty much like at least some of the uses of "a" and "the" in English -- the ones that Russians quickly learn to get right).

As for the 'zo'e' script, this seems to be a wormrunner explanation (ignotum per ignotius), since, no matter how little I understand 'lo, loi, le, lei', I understand 'zo'e' (and, God help us, 'zo'e'e' ) much less.  I gather they are some sort of metalinguistic devices projected (always dangerous) into the object language.  They are names (i.e., direct referring expressions without intermediate calculations) but what they name are picked out on each occasions.  All of which sounds like "le broda' to me, except for the semantically irrelevant 'broda' part. 



----- Original Message ----
From: Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com>
To: lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, April 15, 2010 1:43:41 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: {le} in xorlo

1. And, despite all your complaining about how Lojban fails as a
logical language and how everything is absolutely wrong, you failed
to:
  a. Explain in what way it has failed.
  b. Suggest what to do next.

2. zo'e != lo. I have no idea where you folks got the idea, but AFAIK
"zo'e" is not "lo broda" or anything like that, it is simply an
unspecified sumti, and therefore we don't need a new sumti "zo'e'e" or
any such thing. It's not a particular unspecified thing, it isn't a
specific unspecified thing, and it's not a thing which really is or
isn't or is called an unspecified thing, it's just an unspecified
sumti.

3. Bob, the absolute stupidest way I can put it, and the way I've
hated explaining it, is that lo = a, le = the. That's pretty much how
they universally end up getting translated. lo patfu = a father,
determined by context, probably mine or just any given father (really
depending on context) Any such thing that could fit the x1. le patfu =
'the' father, could still be my father, could be my father-in-law,
could be my friend's father, could be somebody that we both know that
acts very fatherly towards people, it could be a knot in a tree trunk
that looks like your father, but the idea is that it's a particular
thing you're talking about, and you're calling it "patfu".

((Sub-note: If this is wrong, then this is how a non-techy, non-
linguist, non-intelligent audio engineer has perceived how these two
gadri work, and it's clsn/Timo/ARJ that are to blame for teaching me
incorrectly.))

4. Why can't we use a common-sense rule? I see things like plibu
(generic word for external genitalia) and vlagi (word for vulva
[female external genitalia])... so we have an obvious redundancy and
consistency flaw (being that we have a consistency set up from remna
to pinji to ganti regarding gender specification. Get rid of vlagi.
It's -extremely- obvious stuff like that which we need to just remove.
Another, yet different, example is of "mabla" wherein nobody (of whom
I know) uses the standard definition (something like "x1 is a
derogative use of x2" or something stupid like that), and pretty much
everybody else uses it as a swear (x1 is stupid/bad/detestable/shitty/
etc.), so why don't we just skip formalities and change the
definition?  I'm sorry that I don't have too much insight on the issue
of cmavo, but the one that apparently has held the byfy back several
years or whatever I fail to see as a problem. "Without intent" is my
strongly believed and fully uninformed definition of ".ai nai".
Honestly, I mabla-ing hate most UI in the first place (mostly because
they're overused and made endlessly complex by newbies using
ru'ecaisaise'iwhatever so I know precisely how happy/annoyed you are
on a scale of one to a thousand including decimal places into the
millionths, but I have no idea what they're actually trying to say
because they forgot to use a damn gadri and accidentally a whole
tanru), so I don't see why any focus is put on them. They have
absolutely no practical use other than being a stupid toy for people
that don't want to learn the language and just want to spam ".u'i"
instead of "lol" every five seconds. It -REALLY- does not matter what
".ai nai" means, so just pick something and stick with it, and if
everybody bitches about it endlessly, then change it. Personally, I'd
put more focus on fixing whatever little stupid words the linguists
are worried about that I'll probably never use in a million years, and
more importantly, I'd work on simplifying some of the language for
stupid people like myself as I still have absolutely -no- idea what
"ce'u" does, what "pseudo-quantifier binding a variable within an
abstraction that represents an open place." or 'lambda' is supposed to
mean, and I'm scared to death of anything I haven't learned that is
apparently "non-veridical" because I read in the dictionary that it
means something like "a lie", which clearly means I have no
understanding of what the hell it means or how to use it (like "voi").

5. Frankly, I could give less than two shits what some Uni professor's
opinion of Lojban is or what some obnoxious person that I've never
seen on IRC or the mailing list (which leads me to assume they speak
little to no Lojban/haven't studied Lojban and read one article
somebody else wrote and immediately formed an opinion) before thinks
regarding the logical-ness of Lojban, and I think that as soon as we
please the bureaucrats regarding the broken bits of Lojban, we should
stop griping about every little damn thing and instead focus on
community efforts like encouraging people to get on Mumble and leave
it on, starting -some- kind of video-based "lo do ckiku ma zvati" on
YT, and getting a LOT more people to actively participate in the art
and music community, including developing modern pop art and music
using Lojban and coming up with music that is unique to the culture
surrounding the speakers of Lojban (which brings up a small sub-point
that as much as one of those HUGE key points everybody clings to like
the word "Unambiguous™" that Lojban is not culturally neutral, and the
main Lojban group that regularly communicates on IRC has formed its
own living concept of Lojbanic culture, including humour, games, and
music, which I believe we should expand and embrace so that we have
flash animations, shows, music, art, poetry, and a true art culture in
Lojban). Now I shall promptly head back into IRC to have "voi"
explained to me another 20 times and "ce'u" another 200.

This is my wholly uninformed and (relevantly) uneducated opinion on
the matter, and I apologise for none of it.
- Lindar

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