Subject: Re: [lojban] noxemol ce'u

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 13:30:07 -0700 (PDT)

cu'u la pycyn. noi ckaji le tcaci ka fekri:

>I do hope someone will explain this bound/free bit
>again -- not to mention the difference between a property and a quality.
>The first difference seems to be enitrely contextual, the second
>non-existent.

The first *is* entirely contextual, and Lojbab's pretty mcuh agreed that
his understanding of {ka} is contextual. Bound-ka means that ka is
subcategorised for by the gismu. What I'm calling property/quality is
single/double ce'u versus all-ce'u. End of story.

>Would now be a good time to remind people that {cenba} is defined as
>"x1 varies/changes in property/quantity x2 (ka/ni) in
>amount/degree x3 under conditions x4" and so is a lousy example for
>making the (rather dubious) point?

>I suppose one could dredge up another brivla where the
>list actually says only {ka} but where {ni} makes sense, though none of
>the ones used in recent cases happens to be such.

Ad hominem crap notwithstanding, what emerges from your subsequent reply
to xod (God, but you don't make yourself clear) is that the gismu list
should not be taken as saying {ni} is intersubstitutable with {ka} because
they're the same thing semantically, but rather that {cenba} is
polysemous, with cenba-1 taking a property, and cenba-2 taking a quantity.

I was about to yell about xod's point, because I think that's making a bug
into a feature. But if this is what you're saying (and even if it isn't),
I might accept it. It still looks messy to me, though, particularly as it
opens the door for things like {cenba le creka}: if you can put in a
quantity, why not put in any atomic variable?

Which, given what's below, I suspect you'd be cool with:

>Yes, people are not differences, but things differ in the values they
>give as arguments to functions, which values may be people. They differ, of
>course, in the function, not the value of it.

Well, yeah, which is why the {te frica} shouldn't be expressed
extensionally. You're saying {le mamta be ce'u} is such a function. All I
can say is, to me it's still a sumti, so it can't express a relation or
function, qua mapping, but only the result of the function. (It
*involves* a relation, of course.) {le mamta be ce'u} doesn't have the
extension ((Chelsea, Hillary), (Dubya, Babs)); it has the extension
(Hillary, Babs). I want the former her, not the latter.
So {leka makau mamta ce'u} is the only thing that makes sense to me here.

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