Subject: Re: [lojban] A revised ce'u proposal involving si'o (fwd)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 20:30:20 -0400

At 01:44 PM 9/14/01 -0700, Nick NICHOLAS wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
>[Flames and counterflames bypassed. I haven't changed my mind; but
>whatever.]

Flame? Moi?

>The issue in soi vo'a is not soi, it's vo'a. See Wiki, "Why the Book is
>Right and the ma'oste is Wrong" and "Prior usage and discussions of vo'a".

If the community is convinced that the ma'oste is wrong based on history, 
then the community should do no less than to come up with a better 100 
character definition %^)

>I've intimidated the beginners? Yes, and I'm sorry I have. This does not
>mean the debates should not take place. It simply means the time had come
>for a split into two fora, and once again, thank you, Jay, for doing it.

I just wish the split had gone the other way (it did, but no one uses it 
the other way) so that people would first come to the main forum and be 
attracted by what they read. But it didn't. And I don't blame you in 
particular, certainly. Whether I agree with you on any of these issues or 
not (and I haven't yet read whatever you will say below, but it won't 
change this), it's been good to have you back, and very healthy for the 
community.

> > Sometimes I'd love to be able to hang it all and go work on my
> > long-postponed translation of parts of Burton's 1000 Nights and a
> > Night. But I have too many other jobs to do, from the business of LLG, to
> > the dictionary, to responding to queries, and enthusing about Lojban to the
> > outside world, to trying to coordinate a network of volunteers that often
> > defies coordination. I'd love to be able to read the Alice translation and
> > all the rest of the Lojban that the community is writing.
>
>You know what? Go ahead. These issues won't go away anyway, and until
>there's an Elephant, anything we say here is written on the sand.

That has been my opinion for several years. But this one I WILL blame on 
you. You've said that I should be monitoring the list discussions (and 
presenting examples to support my positions) and monitoring the wiki, and 
contributing to it. You've strongly implied that Lojban Central is 
derelict in not monitoring and actively participating in all of these 
discussions on all of the fora, and thus, I have been trying. Failing, but 
trying anyway.

>This does not mean it is illegitimate for me to object to {le la nolni'u
>moi} in Alice, btw, for example. I forced xorxes to explain what he was
>doing, I choose
>not to do it and to dislike it, and we still worked out that it was kinda
>sorta legit. That process was important. But seeing that construction as
>used in Alice, as opposed to debated in the abstract, was also important.
>
>And after all, many of the debates arise precisely because someone tries
>to say something somehow.

That's fine. But they seem to lose that context very quickly, probably 
because people are seeking to make general rules having experienced a 
single incidence.

> > Which is funny since ce'u wasn't introduced until the refgrammar was 95%
> > done. And I read and reviewed the book and think I understood most of it,
> > without understanding ce'u a bit (at the time).
>
>*smile* Well, your words, not mine. If you didn't understand ce'u, you
>didn't understand the ramifications of the Book's discussion. I think you
>still don't

Of course I don't. I'm not arguing with you.

> >Btw, the notion that {ce'u} doesn't fit in {dicra} is, to put it mildly,
> > >puzzling:
> > >lenu mi tavla do cu dicra lenu do gunka kei leka ce'u xi pa toljundyri'a
> > >do ce'u xi re
> > >This is just a property with two slots, relating the interruptor and the
> > >interruptee. This is no different to {simxu}.
>
>By which I meant interrupting event and interrupted event.

Well then obviously I did not understand, since I based my interpretation 
on what looked like the most obvious sumti (mi and do). I completely 
forgot about vo'a and vo'e.

> > I have no problem with the subscripts. I understood it fine.

(Obviously I retract this.)

> But if you
> > had a few more sumti in the x1 and x2 of dicra, I am not sure I would have
> > known. If it had been
>
> > lenu mi tavla la djan cu dicra lenu do gunka tu'a le lojbo kei leka ce'u xi
> > pa toljundyri'a do ce'u xi re
>
> > I don't know that it is so clear which ce'u means what.
>
>You're being disingenuous. ce'u xi pa is vo'a (lenu mi tavla la djan.),
>ce'u xi re is vo'e (lenu do gunka tu'a le lojbo). That's definitional.

It is? Where is this definition? And why should it be so? Why can't they 
refer to any of the other sumti? I seriously do not understand why vo'a 
and vo'e have some sort of privileged role in the x3 of dicra which need 
not refer to x1 or x2 at all.

>(And as it turns out, the subscripts were unnecessary.)

> > And where are the ce'u in
>
> > loi nu do'o mutce casnu va'o la jboliste cu dicra lenu mi gunka kei le ka
> > vo'a rinka lo dukse kalsa
>
>Good lord.
>
>loi nu do'o mutce casnu va'o la jboliste cu dicra lenu mi gunka kei
>le ka ce'u rinka lo dukse kalsa poi toljundyri'a fi ce'u
>
>You can't just be elliptical

Of course I can. This is Lojban; I can be elliptical about anything! 
%^) The rules need to be able to tolerate ellipsis, because human beings 
will ellipsize.

>and assume that means ce'u doesn't work.

If I am forced to not be elliptical in order for you to figure out the 
grammar, then something is wrong. Even if I accept your "definition", I 
think you DO need the subscripts, because if you ellipsize one ce'u you 
don't know which one the other refers to. And in the example in question, 
I should not HAVE to stick that poi clause in there (and indeed it is NOT 
true in my opinion, but I'm not sure what is true which is why I left it 
elliptical).

>Saying "You talk too much on the list interrupts me getting any work done
>by causing too much chaos" is elliptical: you might as well say "by
>causing the ISP to go down" or "by tilting the Earth's Axis towards
>Orion." What precisely has talking on the list got to do with you getting
>any work done?

I'm not sure, but it seems to be directly correlated and in this case I am 
asserting that the correlation implies causality.

But please translate me correctly, since it was carefully worded NOT to be 
a criticism of you.

You-all discuss so much on the list interrupts my working because the 
discussion (and indeed it is the volume, and not the discussion, so that my 
choice of vo'a was only approximate - or maybe vo'a should have been casnu 
mutce, but then I would have trouble fitting in other places like do'o) 
causes excess chaos. I did not say that this chaos caused inattentiveness 
to my work - and indeed it didn't. The chaos has changed the nature of my 
work, so that the prior work was interrupted in favor of new work, and the 
change was sudden enough that it feels like an interruption.

> You answer that by filling in a sumti or bridi. When you do
>that, you have the place to hang ce'u off. QED: "by causing too much
>chaos, *which distracts me from* getting any work done."
>
>I mean, we have the relation
>
>X interrupts Y in that Z.
>
>Whatever Z is, it involves X, obviously:

No it doesn't. That may be a common inference, but "interrupt" is not 
defined as "cause". Your argument might hold for sisti rinka, because it 
is a rinka, or maybe even sistyrinka if dikyjvo conventions apply.

>X is the cause, Z the mechanism.
>Whatever Z is, it also involves Y, obviously: if the mechanism of
>interruption had absolutely nothing to do with Y, then why was Y
>interrupted in the first place? And the slots for X and Y in Z are filled
>with ce'u. To say those slots are unfillable is to say that there is no 
>causal connection between X and Z, or Y and Z. Which is absurd.

I guess I am in favor of allowing absurdity.

>Might the relation be complex to express? Sure, which is why you're
>allowed to express Z elliptically, as you've just done.

But then how do you know what ce'us apply?

>But may I suggest that the kind of thinking that says that the {te dicra}
>does not involve the {se dicra} through some bridi is precisely the kind 
>of woolly thinking Lojban is meant to help you avoid?

Or perhaps the kind of wooly thinking that Lojban is intended to make 
possible to express clearly.

>(And none of the "Metaphysical Freedom" stuff, I prithee. If you wanted
>"Metaphysical Freedom", you shouldn't have allowed the formerly raised
>places in gismu to become unraised, either. This is the very same issue.)

We allow elliptical unraising.

>(Rereading this, the argument isn't as iron-tight as I'd like. It may be
>that the {te dicra} should only have one ce'u slot, vo'a, and that the
>causality to vo'e shouldn't be part of the {te dicra}.

And maybe the reverse is true, that the link to vo'a is strong but the link 
to vo'e is quite nebulous or nonexistent. Or perhaps, as I originally 
interpreted you, the link is to a sumti within either vo'a or vo'e (It 
could be that it didn't really matter what you were doing that led me to be 
interrupted, but merely the fact that you were doing it - this has 
certainly been true in my life at times with regards to certain women 
%^), They did something, and it interrupted me, but the ka place should 
refer to the fact that they did something and not the specific thing that 
they did. But of course you will insist that this is woolly thinking on my 
part, in which case I can only answer "Baaa! %^)

>Can't come up
>with any examples; more like worrying about redundancy. But of course, if
>that's the case, than expressing the {te dicra} with {ce'u} is even less
>of a problem, since the {te dicra} trivially involves {vo'a} = {ce'u}.)

What if it is sometimes one and sometimes two and sometimes none?

>Btw, I did grammar check the brochure texts, which is why they have
>parses, after all; but things did creep in afterwards, as tsali's poem in
>particular changed. (Much more than the others, since we discussed
>for a while which changes would be
>poetically most effective.) Do let me have these corrections soon.

She's halfway through the diagrammed summary at this moment. The key text 
that she takes issue with is not the examples at the end but YOUR 
translation of the introduction. She says that it did not parse - not lots 
of errors and you made "a noble try", but she doesn't think that you 
grammar-checked it. Oh, and she wants to know why you are hung up on 
Jordanians (Jordanian-data-universe!!! %^) - but that was in the lesson 
intro Lojban translation, which she has also looked at). Have no fear; 
your Lojban is being extensively commented on.

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