On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
The problem with this is that we don't have mechanisms for explicitly handling the universe of discourse. Anything you talk about is automatically bound within the hidden variable "the universe of discourse", and you can only indirectly influence what is in this domain. "Everything that has ever been at any location in the universe at any point in time" is implicitly "Everything that ... and is also in the universe of discourse" by default.
Another example of this is the approach to what outer quantifiers should mean. Assuming we've come to some agreement on what the universe of discourse is for the moment, should {ci da} mean "exactly three things" as the CLL proclaims? The way I understand what you're saying, you would think that it shouldn't, and instead there should be another PA for "exactly", and without that addition {ci da} should be something like "at least three, and probably not tremendously larger than three". At least as an outer quantifier; in {lo cacra be li ci} it would be more like "close to three, possibly with some error on either side". Am I right here?
No. I think it should mean exactly three. The difference is that I think "exactly three" should only be considered within context. If we're talking about the house next door, and I say {ci prenu} = {ci da poi prenu}, it should mean that there are exactly three people in the context of the house next door, not that there are exactly three people, in the whole of time and space, real and imagined, etc..., whatever the scope of "universe of discourse" is.
My problem with making the "verbosity and precision correlate tightly" doctrine into law is that precise statements all vanish for being too verbose. It's like pedantic English, you can be very careful in English if you try really hard, but we don't speak that way, and those that try are criticized for sounding awkward.
I'm not sure that's true, and I'm not certain that's really much of a problem if it is. I highly doubt that requiring more words to be more precise- which, by the way, is already true in the vast majority of Lojban as it is- automatically makes higher precision statements cease to be made. I also don't think your comparison with English is very on the ball, but that's neither here nor there.
mi'e la latro'a mu'o
(In the event that my comments below spark a discussion, I've moved this to the main list and altered the subject to reflect the topic at hand.)
On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:34 AM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
This drastically hinders the precision (in fact it basically makes it exactly the same as PA lo GISMU), but yes, PA GISMU under this model is an extremely compact form for a rather uncommon usage.
But fair enough; at the very least the {pa se pelkre} version is sketchy, and we'll leave it at that.
I'm a firm believer in determinism via context and precision via verbosity. That is, I believe that anything about an _expression_ that can be figured out from the context that _expression_ is in, should be left to context, and that a more precise _expression_ should always, without exception, require more words to express than a similar, less precise one.
My reasoning behind both is simply that following those doctrines means we can say things in Lojban more succintly, a definite boon considering the wordiness the language has, IMO.
And it's not at all difficult to add {roroi fe'eroroi} to make the context be "always and everywhere". It does, obviously, require more words, but that's in line with the above.
mi'e la latro'a mu'o
On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Jonathan Jones
<eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:21 AM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
The first version is wrong; that says "there exists exactly one yellow haired thing which ..." (Rather, there is a very slightly less controversial version that I tend to subscribe to: "there is exactly one yellow-haired thing that is at all possible to come up in discussion which ..." The point is that the default universe of discourse should be the universe of discourse, there shouldn't be anything that be reasonably anticipated to come up in conversation that isn't actually in it.)
I subscribe to the idea that the "universe of discourse" is bound by the context that discourse is in, mainly because forcing PA GISMU to mean that there is exactly PA things that GISMU makes the construct pretty much useless, seeing as statements like that are pretty much always incorrect. But this isn't the list to talk about thee issues, being the beginner's thread and all.
If you use su'o instead it's not terrible, but really {da} constructs when you don't want nice sharp precision tend to be undesirable, in my experience.
At any rate, here I'd probably say {lo se ke pelxu kerfa}. {le} might also be appropriate in this context, but I doubt I'd use it. That said, I think more likely the structure of the discussion would be different among fluent in-real-life Lojban speakers. (Few of these exist; I, for example, am pretty quick on IRC, but am almost completely helpless when it comes to spatial things.) I'd expect a lot of up-front establishment of pronouns, for example.
mi'e la latro'a mu'o
On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:01 AM, neizyn.
<sjacket@gmail.com> wrote:
coi
.i mi'e neizyn.
Sorry, I'm just a beginnger! but I was wondering about a special situation.
Suppose there's a group of girls with one guy; I'm talking to one of the girls, and I make a statement referring to the guy without unambiguously referring to him by name or other reference. This is because he's the only person in the group like that. Say he's blonde. Is there a way I can say that "someone is blond" oooooor 'blonde exists/obtains such that x is blonde' ? Better yet, could I use that with some kind of reference?
{pa pelxre} == {pa da poi pelkre} => "one X which-is golden-haired"
{pa lo prenu poi pelxre} => "A singular person which-is blonde"
{lo pelxre prenu} => "One or more blonde type-of person"
{ko'a goi (any of the above)} => "It-1, which-is what we will call {any of the above)"
I'm sure there's other ways to do it as well, but those are the most obvious, to me at any rate.
--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )
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mu'o mi'e .aionys.
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(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )
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