Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Don't know about walls and benches.  The four points (axes) are Present, Future, Retropresent ("Past") and Retrofuture and the three arrows are Retrospective, Prospective and Immediate, radiating from each axis.  All axes are displacements for Present, all vectors are views from an axis.  No language has the whole system intact and purely tense (I couldn't get it into Lojban, alas -- or logic either).  It keeps slopping over into aspects and subjunctives (as in most familiar languages).  Logically, the crucial factors here are that different axes have different extensions of "exist" and events vectored from an axis involve existents of that axis, while events at displaced axes may involve things existing then but not at Present (in particular).  All sorts of other restrictions and violations occur, but this is the basic stuff.
From the orthodox chat, the crucial thing about SAE languages is their Fregean semantics, the world consists of things with holes and things to plug the holes, giving a metaphysics of isolated (and generally characterless) individuals and properties (etc.) that they take on.  This contrasts with languages which go for properties only that intersect and overlap and absorb, and those which simply have processes, and perhaps those which merely have instantaneous sensations.  The existence of languages of any of these types is questionable and the question may well be unintelligible, but without it, there is no SWH.

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From: Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2013 12:10 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 06:59:55 John E Clifford wrote:
> "SAE" is a term of art and refers to certain types of what we would now call
> deep structures; in particular, it is not an averaging of European
> languages in any sense.  Lojban "tenses" are those of logic, essentially
> Prior's, and it took me a number of pages to demonstrate that they were
> tenses at all as they are very different from those of natural languages
> (four points -- or one repeated four times -- and three arrows).  The Hopi
> failure to come up with Lojban (or, indeed, formal logic in its common
> form) has nothing to do with their lack of interest in the project (though
> I suppose they do lacks interest) but to the radically different nature of
> their language.  [I should note that, while I regularly express the
> orthodox view on these matters, I am not perfectly sure they are correct,
> cf. Christianity]

I know about SAE from Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European) and from being at
least a semi-native speaker of three SAE languages. What features of SAE
languages are you talking about? What are the four points and three arrows?
Are they like the four walls and three benches?

Pierre
--
I believe in Yellow when I'm in Sweden and in Black when I'm in Wales.

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