[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [lojban] {porsi}





On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 2:15 PM, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

Do we agree that {ro da zo'u da jo'u da mintu da}?

"ro da zo'u da jo'u da du da", yes.
 
In the abstract, the letter "o" exists only once, just like there is only one number "1".

At the most abstract level, yes, but we talk about letter instances all the time.
 
When speaking abstractly about the letters in a word, there would then however be two of the same "thing", and that would mean there are only distinct four referents.

But that's not the most common way of talking about the letters of a word. If we were to talk like that we would most likely talk about "different letters", not just "letters".
 
Talking about instances of the abstract letter is the only easy way out of this, but then there still remains the slight problem that both of those instances are identical to one another. They differ in nothing, except - you might argue - in the property {lo ka du ma kau}.

Well, their most important difference is their position the word. One important difference is that one carries stress and the other one doesn't.
  
However, does this solve the problem? The word "brodo" is spelled correctly no matter which of those two "o" letters you place first, and I think that's because there aren't two distinct "o" letters, since there is nothing really to tell them apart.

But what's the problem? If you switch around the wheels of a car, you still have the same car. The differences among the wheels are mostly irrelevant. (I know they can be relevant, but let's say they are all brand new, or pick a better example.) You can still talk about "the left front wheel" even though its molecules are not the same molecules they used to be. In the case of the "o" you don't even have to worry about molecules, "the first o" is just "the first o". You can say that it carries the stress, whether you have switched it or not, whatever that may mean. 

If you say that {me'o .obu} has two referents, which you must if you claim {ci moi lo mu lerfu}, then you claim that the _expression_ "o" exists more than once. This is fine by me, but it requires a special domain to work, one in which there are only instances of letters (even though each instance can itself be a kind). I would probably feel more at ease (for a general solution) if it involved {mupli}, but then the aforementioned problem still remains: The two instances differ in nothing, and either of them can be the third letter in "brodo". And these so-called instances of the letters are still very abstract, since words aren't always written down; they can simply be in our minds.

But they do differ in some things. 

This intricacy is what kept me from proposing a solution similar to yours yesterday (I had thought about the _expression_ {by jo'u ry jo'u re boi .obu jo'u dy} and found it very strange (with or without {me'o})!).

I think it's fine, although you may want to do "pa boi by jo'u pa boi ry jo'u pa boi dy jo'u re boi ,o bu" to make it more uniform.

mu'o mi'e xorxes 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.