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

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 30 November 2010 19:17, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> "uipei" is not the best choice to examine "pei", just because "ui" is
> mainly purely expressive, and asking someone to provide a purely
> expressive locution is slightly silly. (But still meaningful.) But
> don't go and conlude from that that "UIpei" in general is silly.
> "UIpei" does not mean, as you seem to think, that the speaker says UI
> and then, independently, asks the listener to provide some kind of
> comment on that. "pei" modifies the meaning of the preceding word, in
> such a way that "UIpei" is a question. "Uipei" has a perfectly
> compositional meaning, but it is not the meaning of UI and then
> separately the meaning of "pei". (The same can be said of "UInai" for
> example. When you say "UInai" you are not expressing something with
> UI, and then somehow reversing what you just expressed. You are
> expressing something with "UInai".)  UIpei asks the listener to answer
> with "UI" or "UInai". It's really quite simple, and it seems to me you
> are just trying hard to not understand.
>
>
> [ But of course ‘uinai’ is a simple blend of ‘ui’ and ‘nai’: “Whee – not!”,
> totally natural (well, only lately) English, as is “Whee – sorta” and the like.

In Japanese, "-nai" is a suffix for the negative form of a predicate
(verb or adjective):

ki-ru (dasni ja'a)
ki-nai (dasni na)

ureshi-i (gleki ja'a)
ureshi-ku-nai (gleki na)

Furthermore, Japanese "oi", like British English "oi", happens to be
an exact equivalent of Lojban "oi", and the following expression is
not impossible in an everyday Japanese situation:

oi-ja-nai (oi zei na)

This can possibly be used as a negating counter-complaint against
someone who complained with "oi" (meaning that this someone was wrong
in uttering "oi"). We can draw many analogies like this between Lojban
and natlangs.

However, xorxes' point is that the meaning of "uipei", like that of
"uinai", is compositional, and I don't think that's the case with
English "Whee - not!" or Japanese "ki-nai", "oi-ja-nai", etc.

You say "uinai" is natural with respect to "Whee - not!", but it's
very unlikely that we would find "Whee - not!" as an index in any
conventional dictionary, while it's very likely that we would find
"uinai" as such an index (jbovlaste does actually list "uinai" for
"unhappiness").


> What is a case where this sort of thing is not true? So, ‘uipei’ comes out to
> mean “Whee – but how much?” or something like that, possibly meaningfull but
> basically dumb  -- nothing like the use you claim for it.

The meaning of English "where" can be considered compositional, made
out of "wh-" (question) and "-ere" (place), which may be similar to
"bu'au pei" that was hypothetically suggested by xorxes. Asking
"Where?", then, would according to you come out to mean "Place - but
what?". This reading sounds dumb, but this isn't how the word comes
out to experienced English speakers, is it? The listener is supposed
to reply such that the "-ere" part of "where" gets specified: "here",
"there", "at my house", etc. In my opinion, "pei" is similar to "wh-",
except that it asks for an attitudinal expression rather than a
predicate-oriented expression.

If I were to invent an English compositional word for "uipei", I might
suggest something like "whappy" from "wh-" and "happy".

A: You bought me a cake!
B: Whappy?
A: Yippee!!

In this example, A isn't supposed to answer with a propositional claim
like "I am happy.", because the question is not concerned with the
format of proposition. It therefore contrasts with the following,
which is proposition-oriented:

A: You bought me a cake!
B: Are you happy?
A: I am, very much.

"Yippee!!" and "I am very much happy." are different manners of
expression. But they can express the same thing.


>> we seem to be content to allow them, so let them ride (but they are another
>>mark
>> against the "logical language" claim, even in the official restricted
> version).
>
> Logic doesn't really enter into it, but "pei" is certainly nice and regular.
>
> [Well, no.  ‘nai’, say, takes a first person expression and then modifies it in
> this case rejecting it “Whee – not”, as we say, and similarly for “Whee – sorta”
>
> and so on.

"broda jenai brode" is an expression not so much of "broda true;
brode, true - not" as of "broda but not brode" based on the
compositional meaning of "jenai". When I see "jenai", it doesn't
partitively say to me "both the first and second elements are true -
the second is not true"; it says "the first is true but the second is
not", and that's because the meaning of "jenai" is readily
compositional at the moment of the utterance.


> But ‘pei’ does not start out with a first person expression and add
> something to it.  It somehow changes the first person expression into a second
> person and then asks about it.  There is a perfectly legitimate (is so far as
> ‘pei’ is legitimate at all) use that looks like this: Speaker says ‘ui’,‘pei’say
>
> the hearer.  No person shifting and a reasonable sort of thing to ask.]

"uipei" is to be taken as semantically one thing at the moment of its
utterance, and, in such an occasion of "pei", the utterer does not
intend a first-person expression to begin with. "pei" does not mark
such an intention of "this is my personal [UI]; now express your
[UI]"; it marks "express your [UI]".

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