Re: [lojban] Re: other-centric UI

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

John E Clifford wrote:
> I do wish you would try to justify it, since justification often leads to 
> clarification of what is being claimed.  So far as I can tell, empathetic 
> emotions (etc.) are not all that common (nor all that rare). They are common 
> enough that I am surprised that, in the gazillion different ways of doing 
> expressions, that made their way into CLL, this possibility was missed, 

The fact that empathic emotional expression was needed, we recognized 
before CLL.  Whether there really is a need to express the direction of 
the empathy attitudinally wasn't recognized, and I am not that sure it 
makes sense.

Identifying the direction of the empathy seems to me to be a greater 
degree of self-analysis than we expected for attitudinals/emotional 
expression.  I can imagine that such analysis might happen sometimes.

(The example that comes to mind - watching a crowd of kids playing 
sports, and one of them trips and goes flying. My "Oooh, that's gotta 
hurt" could be expressed Lojbanically as an attitudinal, and I can 
imagine if expressing it to a fellow spectator, who by not reacting may 
not have seen it, I may wish to "point" to the kid who went flying.

But I think this would be rare, and in the similar case of two kids 
whose names I don't know crashing into each other, I'd have to logically 
AND two descriptions "oooh, that's gotta hurt - the short kid with black 
hair and the tall kid with the red jersey" - this seems to have gone far 
beyond expressing empathy.)

Since I'm not sure that the expression really empathic, the solution 
that comes to mind for situations like this is NOT attitudinals or 
vocatives, but observatives, possibly with attitudinals attached 
reflecting the speaker's reaction ("cortu .uu" or ".uu cortu" for the 
above example, and it is trivial to add "fa le tordu ..." on the end to 
identify the one(s) being "empathized" with).

This intuitively seems more "logical" to me, and hence to be preferred 
for Lojbanic expression.  UI isn't generally intended to be an 
abbreviation for longer Lojban expressions, though we've sometimes 
analyzed discursives as a shortened form of metalinguistic expression, 
and I sense that the use of da'oi is closer to a shortened discursive 
claim than it is to a true expression of empathy.

But I would have to see it in context, and THAT is what is missing from 
the examples cited.  If this usage has actually occurred on IRC, as 
selckiku asserts, then rather than trying to invent examples where it 
MIGHT beuseful, the better justification would be to quote chunks of IRC 
conversation where the usage HAS occurred, to see if the situation 
really seemed like one where empathy expression is taking place.

lojbab

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