[lojban] Attitudinal scales and the meaning of {cu'i}

[Daniel Brockman <dbrockman@gmail.com>]

I have a proposal for a simplification and improvement
of the interpretation of attitudinal scales.

This is nothing new --- in fact, I'm just going to describe
the way I've been using attitudinals for years --- but I'm
not sure how common this particular interpretation is.

The core of my suggestion might be that we stop giving
definitions of {UI cu'i}: I believe that {UI cu'i} should have
a completely compositional meaning.  It's good to give
usage examples, of course, but I think we should treat
{UI cu'i} more or less exactly like {UI ru'e} or {UI sai}.

Just as {UI ru'e} and {UI sai} always mean simply
"attitude weak" and "attitude strong", the meaning
of {UI cu'i} should be "attitude not present" --- nothing
more, nothing less.

This should be contrasted with {UI nai}, which always
has a lexical meaning.  You can guess the meaning,
because it's usually some kind of opposite of {UI},
but you can't be sure until you look in a dictionary.

So, my proposal:

 * {UI} and {UI nai} are dictionary-defined.
 * {UI sai}, {UI ru'e} and {UI cu'i} are fully compositional.

I'm leaving out {cai} on purpose because its semantics
doesn't really matter for this issue, and we can talk about
that later (I happen to think it should be lexical).

Again, this is not really a change proposal so much
as a proposal to simplify the explanation of UI.

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