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Re: [lojban] {.au}/{djica}={.ai}/{?}. No gismu for intention



On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 7:12 AM, v4hn <me@v4hn.de> wrote:
coi rodo

please keep in mind I'm a {cnino lobtadni} and everything I say
might be complete nonsense.

coi .van.

It has to be {cnino lobytadni} or {cnino jbotadni} due to phonotactic constraints.  But no worries, I myself am a {vitno cnino jbotadni} here.

 
On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 12:42:18AM -0400, Mike S. wrote:
> It's not quite that simple as Xorxes has pointed out.  Some attitudinals
> definitely do affect the truth conditions of the bridi they're applied to,
> namely the ones that shift the bridi into what in natlangs would be called
> an irrealis mood.  Perhaps "a'o" is the archetypical example.

I would totally agree to {da'i}, because this actually means that you _suppose_
something, whether or not it is true.

However I do not agree to {a'o}. I just read through the list of cmavos in UI1
and I incline to think all words in there do not modify truth values.
(maybe they do by pragmatics, but they do not by truth-functional calculus)

I found CLL §13.3 regarding a-series and e-series attitudinals clear enough:

As mentioned at the beginning of Section 2, attitudinals may be divided into two groups, the pure emotion indicators explained in that section, and a contrasting group which may be called the “propositional attitude indicators”. These indicators establish an internal, hypothetical world which the speaker is reacting to, distinct from the world as it really is. Thus we may be expressing our attitude towards “what the world would be like if ...”, or more directly stating our attitude towards making the potential world a reality.

In general, the bridi paraphrases of pure emotions look (in English) something like “I’m going to the market, and I’m happy about it”. The emotion is present with the subject of the primary claim, but is logically independent of it. Propositional attitudes, though, look more like “I intend to go to the market”, where the main claim is logically subordinate to the intention: I am not claiming that I am actually going to the market, but merely that I intend to.

In fairness, the BPFK section on irrealis attitudinals mentions some disagreement in the speaking community on this matter.  I hadn't realized this until I read that section more carefully today.


If a soldier goes to war, his wife might say something like:
"He'll come back" without actually knowing that he will.
You could say that's the same as "I hope he will come back", but
this second sentence leaves the possibility that he will not come back
whereas the first one denies that possibility.

Right.  In this case the wife wants to make an unequivocal assertion despite her fear. (For this reason I think she'd leave off {a'o} if she were speaking Lojban.)

 
I would like to translate the first sentence with something like
{.i a'o lo speni be mi be'o ba xrukla}
and the second sentence with
{.i mi pacna lo nu lo speni be mi be'o ba xrukla}

As I just argued I think those sentences are rather different in what they
say, though the second is something of an objective description of the first.

Well that's crux of the differing opinions.  I think that "he'll come back" translates as simply {.i ko'a ba xrukla} and that you're adding something not in the original English when you add {a'o}. If you wanted to add something to represent the English intonation, maybe you'd want to say {.i ko'a ba ba'e xrukla} = "he will COME BACK [implied: not die]".

I'd go so far as to say that {a'o} is effectively a shortcut for {mi pacna lo nu}, though I am not sure who would agree with me on that.

mu'o mi'e .maik.

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