Re: [lojban] Re: xu dai

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 11:20 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well, aside from the fact that I have never heard anyone say that (to the best of my knowledge),

A Google search for "I hear you ask" gives 50,500,000 hits, so if
people don't say it, it seems they at least do write it..

>what could it possibly mean?

I'm surprised you're not familiar with the expression.

> It looks like a factual claim, but admittedly is not.  So it looks like a certain style of psychobabble from some time ago -- along with "I hear what you're saying" and the like.  Surely that has no place in a logical language any more than in a reasonable culture.  It might, I suppose, be an indirect way to ask a question, but it seems foredoomed to fail in most cases, since the obvious response is "No, I didn't", not an answer.

"No, I didn't" doesn't seem to work. If you are the kind of person who
answers "yes" when asked if you have the time, your comment should be
"But I didn't ask". The expected reaction is of course not to respond
anything, but to wait for the speaker to answer the question they are
sort of attributing to you.

To take one example from the first page of hits: :
http://cwdesigncompany.com/Blog1/2010/10/where-has-cindy-been-of-late-i-hear-you-ask/

> I just don't see how anyone else's mental states has anything to do with my question and I don't see how my top level 'xu', however gussied up, can not be a question.

It is a question, one which the speaker themself is about to answer.
It's a way of setting up a topic, creating interest, etc.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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