Re: [lojban] Time for the perenial other-centric-.ui conversation

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 11:58 PM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> So long as empathy doesn't require that I feel the actual emotion myself,
> I'm fine with that.  I don't want to say .oidai and accidentally imply that
> I .oi

I always understood it as expressing empathy with the perceived oi,
which can't possibly mean you feel oinai. There is absolutely a
difference between recognizing pain in somebody else and empathizing
with it!

I'm sorta with JEC on this one, in that UI should be expressing your
emotion, but if da'oi is really just about expressing your empathy
with a specified person then it makes total sense to me. Some
da'oi-advocates seem to indicate that this is what it is - something
semantically equivalent to a way to specify the referent of dai
(although syntactically quite distinct); that seems useful. (Although
if it's in COI, doesn't it have the side effect of resetting the
referent of "do"?) Some seem to want it to mean "I believe so-and-so
feels the emotion indicated by saying whatever attitudinal (or,
apparently from some example sentences, string of attitudinals -
something dai cannot modify, because I can uedai after oiing or after
oidaiing*) and am not saying anything at all about my own emotional
state." In this case, you are stating apparent facts about the world,
not expressing your own feelings; statements of fact or belief like
that are what bridi are *for.* I'm against any experimental cmavo
whose advocates can't agree on what it means, because that kind of
imprecision is incompatible with what the non-experimental parts of
the language strive to be (although they have sometimes been every bit
as murky in their own way), so you can put me in the anti-da'oi bin
until you guys make up your mind.

The notion that saying "no, da'oi shouldn't work like that even though
nothing else does" is telling you that there's no good way to say
"ooh, that must have hurt" in Lojban is just silly, because nobody but
you seems resistant to using the vast majority of the grammar in the
way it was intended - the "ooh" is an English UIesque interjection
about the *speaker's* emotion, and the rest of the sentence is a
declarative sentence and really ought to be translated as one. The
emotional gismu were created for a reason.

That said (tangent warning!), I think there's quite a difference
between zo'o and u'idai. The "surprise!" of an unexpected party is
much more akin to the former, and is not empathizing with anything at
all. It is not a perceived emotion, but an intended one. If it is to
be expressed with a UI at all, and I'm not sure it needs to be, it's
definitely not one modified with dai (or da'oi, if that's a
specified-referent dai relative).

Now, I can see the value of a possible experimental dai-alike for
intended emotions, such that u'iblah and zo'o are synonymous, and
ueblah conveys something like "this is said/done with the intent that
it will be surprising!" But such a hypothetical cmavo is not and
should not be confused with dai. If da'oi is a semantically dai-like
cmavo, then this hypothetical would probably quickly get a
corresponding experimental COI. And I'm not sure the dai-for-intent
cmavo is even remotely necessary - one could just as easily say "spaji
.ai" in the three syllables needed for any experimental cmavo not
starting with x, and use the observative "spaji" instead of "spaji
da'oi."

 - mi'e .kreig.

 * John: by "oiing" in this context I mean "expressing pain through
the use of zo oi" rather than "feeling pain"; it's an English
shorthand for "cusku lu .oi li'u" rather than for "cortu."

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