Subject: Re: mine, thine, hisn, hern, itsn ourn, yourn and theirn (was[lojban] si'o)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 19:54:32 -0400

I sent this without the last couple of lines which conclude the story. Sorry.

At 11:37 AM 8/24/01 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>In a message dated 8/24/2001 2:32:21 AM Central Daylight Time,
>[email-masked] writes:
>>(damn, I miss the real and useful {me}),
>>
>>When we went along with TLI on the change in me, we had determined that
>>there was an easy alternate way to do the old me. Why is it unsatisfactory?
>
>How does it go exactly?

> I remember a thread a few weeks ago that went on for
>some time trying to find a way to say "mine" (the first fully functional
>concept of the average human infant -- I wonder if anyone has ever tested
>whether "I" is first understood at what can safely use what is mine).
>Eventually the thread came up with something that worked for the specific
>case, but was not generalizable. So, the "easy alternate way" is either
>hard, doesn't work or is not widely known. "x1 is subject to a nonessential
>defensible and defeasible claim to privileged association or use by x2" is
>what in Lojban?

association: srana
which as the history lesson comments below is also one translation for the 
old "me".

>(History lesson for newbies. JCB invented (presumably stole from someone in
>the anonymous hordes) this notion (not so fully defined) and assigned it to
>{me}.

It was Scott Layson, I thought, but I can't find the source. I remember 
the line about the "me-shaped hole in the language".

The first printed mention of me was in the February 1978 TL2:114
where JCB defined it as
"X is a part/manifestation/characteristic of the designated thing giving 
examples
(translated to Lojban valsi) of

ko'a me ko'e
x1 is a manifestation of x2

le mela djenis pluta
the Jenny-route (i.e. the route associated with Jenny)

ko'a me la socrates
x1 is a socrates

ta me levi bloti
that is a piece of this boat

ta me la kraisler
That is a Chrysler (providing we designate the entire output of the 
Chrysler Corp as la kraisler - which JCB said was motivated by its 
then-usefulness with me.

He then stated
roda robu'a zo'u go da me loi bu'a gi da bu'a
so that me and loi mutually destruct.

By TL 4/3 of 11/80, pg 20-21, (pc's supplement, so he is stuck with his own 
pronouncements %^)

"
... Any argument can give rise to a predicate: a sign for the property of 
being specifically related to the thing named by the argument. The device 
for this is the LW me attached directly to the front of the first word of 
the argument ...
... It is not possible to specify, in isolation, the exact property to 
which such predicates refer, or the exact relation to the named 
object. These must be deciphered from the particular context.
"

Unfortunately in the next lengthy paragraph, pc went on to cite several 
examples of use of me, and the semantic meaning to be inferred, but all of 
the examples were of the me phrase as the seltanru (modifier) of a 
modifier-modificand tanru, such as
me la kraislr karce, which does not really tell us what me means.

Now because of this vagueness, when pc and I discussed incorporating "me" 
in Lojban in 1987, I came up with a place structure of:

x1 pertains to [sumti] in property/aspect x2

not noticing that this was essentially the place structure of srana.

Jump ahead to 1992, when pc's "replacement" logician, Russell Holmes wrote 
the article on the TLI Web site
http://www.loglan.org/Lodtua/lodtua-92-3.html

from which I extract:
>The issue which I will try to tackle in this column can be vaguely 
>summarized as the problem of "sets". There are a number of different kinds 
>of ways of referring (or appearing to refer) to several objects at once 
>(thus "putting things together".) In English, these are handled in an 
>extremely sloppy fashion (as will be seen in examples below); in Loglan, 
>they must be handled in a clear and unambiguous fashion. This, of course, 
>is easier said than done.
>We start with a typically horrible example:
>· ?Da bie le mrenu
>proposed as meaning
>· X is one of the men I have in mind
>BIE is the infix predicate of set membership: "X bie Y" means "X is an 
>element of set Y". The speaker seems to want to say "X is an element of 
>the set of men I have in mind". But the speaker has not succeeded in 
>saying this: what he has said is "X is a member of the man I have in mind 
>(or is a member of each of the men I have in mind)". An even worse example 
>of the same phenomenon is
>· ?Da bie le setci:
>does this mean "X is an element of the set I have in mind (or of each of 
>the sets I have in mind)" (the correct interpretation) or "X is one of the 
>sets I have in mind" (the interpretation parallel to the incorrect 
>interpretation proposed for the sentence above)?
>The problem here is a confusion between plural reference (reference to 
>more than one individual) and reference to a set of individuals. It is 
>true that LE MRENU may have plural reference: it may refer to Tom, Dick 
>and Harry, for example. In this case, the sentence DA BIE LE MRENU will 
>mean DA BIE LA TAM, ICE DA BIE LA DIK, ICE DA BIE LA HERI (X is a member 
>of Tom, X is a member of Dick, and X is a member of Harry). Since we do 
>not think of the three gentlemen as being sets, we do not know what to 
>make of this sentence. What the speaker wanted to say was "X is a member 
>of {Tom, Dick, Harry}", and the problem is that LE MRENU cannot be made to 
>refer to the set {Tom, Dick, Harry}, but only to each of its elements 
>individually.
>There is a way to say what the speaker originally wanted to say: we can 
>use the ME operator of predification to build the predicate ME LE MRENU, 
>which means "is one of the men I have in mind"; in our present context, 
>this means "is either Tom, Dick, or Harry". We can then use the LEA 
>operator of set formation to build LEA ME LE MRENU, which means (hey, 
>presto!) "the set of those men I have in mind (the ones designated by LE 
>MRENU)", or, in the present context, {Tom, Dick, Harry}. We can then say
>· Da bie lea me le mrenu,
>which really does mean
>· X is one of the men I have in mind

Back to pc:
> Like most of his "inventions," he overused this one to the point where
>it was unclear just what it meant. At some point it was decided to give it a
>precise meaning again, keeping the grammar as a two-place brivla. The
>meaning hit upon was "x1 is one of the things referred to by x2," either
>because that was a pretty good approximation to its most common use at the
>time or because there was a felt need to do something to prevent people from
>translating "John is a man" as {la djan du lo ninmu}, which, while both
>grammatically and logically correct -- and thus better than the average first
>translations -- was very bad style and probably arrived at not by analysis
>but by simply copying the English word for word. Something was then found to
>take on the old job, but I don't know what that something is -- and am
>apparently not alone in this ignorance.)

This change was never documented, unless you are referring to the above by 
Holmes.

We eventually adopted the Holmesian "me" after consulting with pc, because 
Cowan was convinced that it was more logically sound. As reference, look at
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9406/msg00044.html
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9407/msg00121.html
and other messages in those threads for where we first started talking 
about switching to Holmesian "me".

Finally, Cowan came down in favor of the change with
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9511/msg00101.html

And we decided that we could use srana for the other meaning of "me"

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