Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: remoi malglico (was: A revised ce'u proposal involving si'o

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 22:26:15 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Nick NICHOLAS wrote:

>
> cu'u la xod.
>
> >I want to argue against And's proposal too, but my arguments are based on
> >the differences between "relationship" or "quality", and "idea". They are
> >not based on any differences between "ckaji le ka ce'u broda ce'u" and
> >"sidbo". Here again, are we letting English concepts poison our
> >understanding of similar-but-different gismu?
>
> xod, the metalanguage of Lojban is still English. Inasmuch as {si'o} has a
> definition at all, that definition is "idea/concept". We can guess at what
> an 'idea' or a 'concept' are in English; how the hell are we supposed to
> guess what a {si'o} is in Lojban? Is it a {sidbo}? But then, what's a
> {sidbo}? Is it an idea, or a concept? Or both, or neither? What is an
> idea, anyway? How do you get away from English there? By prototype? By
> formalism? Who will tell us? Will it be you? Will it be me?
>
> malglico is a good thing to be on the alert against. malglico purely for
> malglico's sake is not. You're asking for a bootstrapping that I think
> impossible. We can't agree what a 'concept' is in English, and saying it's
> actually a {sidbo} in Lojban solves this? With the defined place structure
> "x1 (idea abstract) is an idea/concept/thought about x2 (object/abstract)
> by thinker x3"? Which disambiguates what exactly?

Since you know more than one language you surely know words in one
language which are difficult to translate to another. (Let's see you
explain "campy" in Greek.) Such words require paragraphs of explanation.
If "sidbo" == "idea", and if every gismu really just means a single word
in English, then Lojban is an elaborate code for English. It also means
that any hope of searching for a Sapir Whorf effect is a joke!

In any case, such bootstrapping is difficult but not impossible, because
if it were there would only be one language on the planet. There are even
words and phrases and noises in dialects that are difficult to explain
explicitly in their parent languages! We can create new concepts that do
not have easy analogues in English or any other natural language. Part of
building a new language is creating an entirely new universe of discourse,
a new way to stare at the common world and break it down into concepts.
Words and grammar are the mechanical part, and in my opinion the boring
part.

What makes a language interesting to me is not its grammar but the way it
looks at the world. It's the "100 words for snow" issue. And again, if
there's no attention to this, then there is really nothing but lip service
towards the S-W effect. I am attracted to Lojban because I am interested
in such issues. I want to see the world a different way and hopefully a
more logical and better way. But not the same old English way! So this is
where I could say "If you aren't interested in this, why choose Lojban? If
you want X you know where to find it.", where X = "English".

Part of the Lojbanic worldview could be some deep relationship between
ckini and sidbo which is obvious to the jbojbe but difficult, not
impossible, to explain in English. This is why I can't trivially argue
against And's proposal simply because the English ideas don't match up.

> No; we have to keep talking about this in English.

Certainly not! We have at least two Hebrew speakers if not three on this
list. Perhaps they could discuss some of these issues in Hebrew and see
what they arrive at, for instance.

> At least with formalistic approaches, you're not expressly copying
> English. Talking about {si'o} with a bunch of lambdas is not inherently
> malglico; I would have thought it's a good thing. In fact, it was the
> *only* way I could understand what Lojbab means by his protean {ka}: by
> not concentrating on any of the places, he's concentrating on the
> {selbri}. (Wish he'd said that earlier, of course.)

Sorry, I don't know what a lambda is. If you can point me to a URL that
will teach me the rudiments of this Lambda Calculus, I'll read it.

> Talking about {ce'u} (and lambdas) was formalistic, and my impression
> was, this is how we've worked out what {du'u} and {ka} are --- not, in
> the first instance, by talking about English "properties" and
> "propositions". I think
> it absolutely legitimate to expand this to {si'o}; and I now think And's
> proposal makes me understand {si'o} more, not less.
>
> I'm rapidly tiring of these running street-battles, btw. If it does come
> down to who yells the longest, it won't be me...

I don't know what this means. I am shifting the reference frame of these
"running street-battles" to one that might invalidate some of them. If
you're tired of the flame wars, give me a hand here.

In fact, a possible logical extension of this idea is that the baseline is
an unchangeable artifact, like any natlang grammar over the time span of
an education, and ponder what the hidden assumptions of it are. This is a
position of extreme conservatism, that could never discuss the idea of
resolving the contradiction of vo'a, for instance. vo'a would simply be
taken to refer to {either the self-bridi or the main-bridi}. Tough luck if
the reader finds it confusing. "Isn't it interesting", this viewpoint
would notice, "that while Lojban is so precise about everything else,
concerning this they are ambiguous!"

-----
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