Subject: RE: [lojban] The Knights who forgot to say "ni!"

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2001 06:02:36 -0400

At 09:33 PM 8/29/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>On this issue, which I'm agnostic about, it seems plausible that
>whoever wrote the definitions was (na'e mabla) incompetent

I plead guilty.

> and that
>the intention was for jei to mean "whether" and ni to mean "how much".
>There are examples in The Book that support these meanings. So it
>is open to debate how binding the mahoste definitions should be seen
>as being.

Feeling exemplary and in a mood to be stomped on, my original concept of ni 
was something like
lo rupnu be li panono cu ni le kosta cu kargu

In other words it was a quantity or measurement of the bridi 
relationship. It may or may not be amenable to ce'u because it is not 
clear whether the x1 measures a particular place of the inner bridi e.g. 
lo mitre be li panonono cu ni mi klama le zarci, and there is no particular 
place that 1000 meters actually corresponds to (the route comes close but 
how one measures backtracking and looping could make things complex).

As I think I've said before, jei was intended as a hook for eventual 
implementation of fuzzy logic. If it has an equivalent, it might be jei 
broda = ni le du'u broda cu jetnu, but that begs the question if we can't 
agree on what ni means.

My stating these former intentions has little to do with what was said in 
the book. I didn't spend a lot of time reviewing that particular paper, alas.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org