Subject: Re: lojbabbitry a (ce'u)

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 15:45:10 -0700 (PDT)

Recent disagreements notwithstanding, I largely agree with the tenor of
pc's remarks:

* Membership in a selma'o may imply nothing to Lojbab about a cmavo's
semantics; but absent any better information, the natural default
assumption is that it does. If you want Usage to Decide, be prepared for
Usage to do the natural human thing of drawing categorial inferences.

* I may disagree with pc on what si'o means (I don't know, because
regrettably I've lost track --- Elephant Elephant Elephant!); but I
certainly agree that
discussing it is meaningful, and that this is not an eggheaded abstract
discussion, as Lojbab implies (a display of "anti-eggheadism" I
find pretty rich, coming from someone presiding over a language
dedicated to people speaking in predicates), but rather a discussion
with obvious linguistic consequences on what it makes sense to say in
Lojban at all. Saying
si'o is what goes into the x1 of sidbo is lamely circular, in any case.
Without concrete examples (is Communism a si'o? Is pleasure? Is going to
the store? Is me going to the Starbucks coffeehouse at 11:05 AM, last
Monday?), I can't take any of it seriously.

* This wide-eyed metaphysical constraint guff has just got to stop; and
it should certainly not be getting in the way of defining what the hell
these words mean in the first place. If you want to
be metaphysical in your own time, go ahead; but when people of flesh and
blood speak Lojban, in a Newtonian universe, of course it makes sense to
tell them that you can't say {mi djuno lenu mi klama le zarci}, because
that implies that going to the store is an event happening inside your
head, instead of a thought. If you want to say that in some
hypothetical universe there's no difference
between events and thoughts, knock yourself out --- but why on earth
should I be saying that in a *beginners* lesson?

The same goes for si'o:
if not all "ideas/concepts" are either propositional (du'u) or
experiential (li'i), for God's sake give me a specific counterexample, not
an alternate reality, or Lao Tze's Gedankenexperiment of being a butterfly.
People of flesh and bone don't talk like that. Lojban supporting
descriptions of the Common Sense universe take priority of Lojban
supporting solipsism, general relativity, time travel, or whatever else.
Get the basics anchored first; then do your metaphysical expansions.

Or do you really think the Hopi couldn't tell the difference between today
and tomorrow, and the Trobriand islanders (Massim District, Northeast
Papua New Guinea) couldn't tell individuals apart?

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing I REJECT {gumri}
[email-masked] (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)