* Tuesday, 2014-11-18 at 18:23 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 11:50 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> > Aside:
> > The kind "going shopping" isn't a going shopping, surely?
>
> In a metalinguistic universe of discourse that contains both a kind and the
> instances of the kind (i.e. not the universe of discourse of our speaker),
> then I would say that the kind is not one of its instances, no. But if the
> question is whether the referent of "lo nu klama lo zarci" satisfies the
> predicate "nu klama lo zarci", then surely the answer must be yes.
>
> > That there's no easy way in lojban to differentiate between going
> > shopping and goings shopping is a real problem, I feel.
>
> I think the distinction is necessarily metalinguistic, so no linguistic
> differentiation would really help.
I just meant to point out that english makes this distinction - going
shopping is a kind, but goings shopping are (probably?) instance events.
(I expect you'd argue that goings shopping technically could be subkinds
of going shopping, and if that seems odd it's just because subkinds of
going shopping happen not to be a very common thing to talk about?)
> There's no problem having predicates that mean "kind", "instance",
> their relation, relation between them and a property, and so on, but
> these predicates would only be mostly useful for linguistic analysis,
> i.e. for metalinguistic discourse, not particularly useful to say
> something directly, because as soon as you introduce them into the
> discourse, there will be other metalinguistic kinds/instances that
> apply to these linguistic ones.
Sure.
I do feel though that lojban could do with an unambiguous way to refer
to the kind of a unary predicate, and that it's problematic for {lo} to
be ambiguous/vague between doing that and getting subkinds or non-kind
instances.
> > Is claiming that an event-kind occurs at a particular time not
> > equivalent to claiming that an event instance of the kind occurs at
> > that time?
>
> Your second claim may be ambiguous. Do you mean claiming that there's an
> instance that occurs, or do you mean there being an instance of which one
> claims that it occurs?
I meant the former.
> The universe of discourse that contains instances is
> richer, which means it allows you to make more fine distinctions, but it
> also forces you to make these distinctions. The coarser grained universe of
> discorse with kinds doesn't allow/force these distinctions.
>
> > Could you clarify something else for me about the kinds translation:
> > if ko'a and ko'i are event-kinds, does {ca ko'u ko'a balvi ko'i} imply
> > {ca ko'u ko'a .e ko'i fasnu}?
>
> Probably. That would depend on the details of the semantics of "balvi",
> which being a time relation is of course tricky to tense. But to make sense
> of it, ko'u would probably have to be long enough for ko'i to occur and
> then ko'a to occur at ko'u. Say something like "this spring the swallows
> came after school started".
>
> ko'u = this spring
> ko'a = the swallows come
> ko'i = school starts
>
> > If so, why also explicitly declare ko'a to fasnu? But if not, I think
> > the kinds translation's meaning might be quite different from that
> > I attribute to the original sentence.
>
> I'm thinking the first connectand is independent of the tag-carrying
> connectand. The tag-carrying connectand might also imply the first
> connectand, but that's not necessarily the case for all tags.
OK. That does mean there's no real co-ordination problem with {je ba
bo}. (But there still is with {je nai ca bo}, which is what the end of
this email is about.)
> > Also if so, actually - I wouldn't understand {ca ko'u broda gi'e ba bo
> > brode} to imply that {ca ko'u brode}, but rather that {ca ko'u ba
> > brode}.
>
> Yes, but ba what? "ba ko'u" or "ba lo nu broda"?
Both, and more precisely ba an event of broda which is ca ko'u, but not
itself having to be ca ko'u.
But maybe I'm wrong. If we'd stuck with the idea from CLL that {broda
gi'e [tag] bo brode} "claims" broda and brode, then it would make sense
for bridi operators like {ca ko'u} applied to the tagged connection to
imply the correspondingly operated claims of broda and brode.
> broda .i [jek] [tag] bo brode -> broda .i [jek] [tag] lo nu (na) broda cu
> brode
> sounds reasonable to me for tenses. The "(na)" doesn't really kick in for
> "je" or for "naja", so these two examples don't cover all cases. For
> non-tenses I want to read it as:
> broda .i [jek] [tag] bo brode -> broda .i [jek] broda [tag] lo nu brode
> but that may be even more problematic for "jonai" type connectives.
> > So I guess this kind of reasoning would have {broda .i je nai ca bo
> > brodo} mean something like "broda occurs, but broda never occurs
> > simultaneously with brodo"? Whereas I would have expected it to mean
> > something more like "broda occurs some time when brodo doesn't".
>
> I hope you are not thinking that by rejecting an equivalence of "lo" with
> "su'o" I'm somehow embracing an equivalence with "ro".
No no. I'm assuming that, in the current discussion, whenever you say
{lo nu broda}, you mean it to refer to the kind of {nu broda}. The
quantifications in my english sentences were over time, not over
instances.
> I think it just means "broda occurs, but not simultaneously with
> brodo".
I think the english is ambiguous there. To disambiguate: do you mean
this to imply that broda does not occur simultaneously with brodo?
Martin
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