From nicholas@uci.edu Wed Sep 12 20:07:53 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: nicholas@uci.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_1); 13 Sep 2001 03:07:53 -0000 Received: (qmail 98898 invoked from network); 13 Sep 2001 03:06:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 13 Sep 2001 03:06:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO e4e.oac.uci.edu) (128.200.222.10) by mta2 with SMTP; 13 Sep 2001 03:06:54 -0000 Received: from localhost (nicholas@localhost) by e4e.oac.uci.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id UAA01988; Wed, 12 Sep 2001 20:02:08 -0700 (PDT) X-Authentication-Warning: e4e.oac.uci.edu: nicholas owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 20:02:06 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: To: Cc: Nick NICHOLAS Subject: Re: si'o [was: Re: [lojban] Re: lojbabbitry a (ce'u) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Nick NICHOLAS doi noi tamne maikyl.: do cusku loi xamgu I tend to agree with you that the most usual notion of si'o will be your first: a conventional topic of discourse. This would mean si'o is not really either a {nu} or a {du'u}, but a {te djuno} (of which {se casnu}, which you appealed to, are a subset.) Extensionally, I suppose, it would be a mass of {du'u}. (By that jargon, I mean defining the word by enumerating the things it refers to.) That holds for Communism, for example. But what holds for {le si'o gerku}, or {le si'o xunre}? This, too, might be a mass of {du'u} extensionally; but they're not grouped together by common subject matter so much as by common relationship. And's version of it --- {ce'u ce'u gerku}, what you get out of a bridi involving {gerku} once you strip away all its potential sumti, and concentrate on the relationship on its own --- is I think a useful thing to have around. It's not the same thing as {si'o} meaning Communism, of course. It is the same thing as Lojbab's {ka}, except that {si'o} has that extra place, so it has to be *one person's* abstraction of Doghood or Redhood. (Just as {du'u}, by virtue of its x2, has to be verbalisable.) It's that "one person's" that throws the spanner in the works, of course. If {si'o} is about individual experience ({li'i}), rather than black-and-white, pen-and-paper propositions ({du'u}), then it makes no sense to speak of Communism as {si'o}. It won't do to say that you and I understand Communism to be different things; there must be a common core of straightforward, {sedu'u}-like claims about the world that I can point to and say "That's Communism". So Communism may not fit in {si'o} after all. Hmpf. Wish it did. And to my mind, {le si'o xunre} is closer to a {pensi sepi'o da} (well, just a {pensi}, really) than a {slabu se casnu} like Justice or Communism. Oh, and the intent *was* that you shouldn't have to insert {ce'u} everywhere, and that it should behave just like {ke'a}. That's why we insisted so much that {ka} not be Lojbab's-ka by default, because that would mean you *would* have to insert {ce'u} everywhere. >I guess i want to say: even though we want logical perfection >right now & fully airtight so the pretensions of Lojban can be >realized at last, the truth is, this does depend on the development >of Lojbanic psychology & this is a long, long way from happening yet. Michael, you may well be right; but if we don't make an effort right now, how will we ever know? And even if it doesn't succeed (just as I don't think ultimately Lojban will "succeed" either), that doesn't make the effort any less noble. You already know about {le ka pluka pe lenu kalte loi pavyseljirna}, after all. :-) -- == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == Nick Nicholas, Breathing I REJECT {gumri} nicholas@uci.edu (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)