Subject: Re: si'o [was: Re: [lojban] Re: lojbabbitry a (ce'u)

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 20:02:06 -0700 (PDT)

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. :-)

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