Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: noxemol ce'u

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 10:59:01 EDT

In a message dated 9/20/2001 8:07:58 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Presumably you will allow {la dubia frica la tclsis ce'u}
> where I would want {la dubias frica le tclsis le ka ce'u du makau}?
> 

Why that presumption? I am not sure. {la dubias frica la tclsys ce'u} is a 
selbri standing alone, so presumably either an observative or a claim with a 
{zo'e} first argument, if it is asserted at all. In neither case would it 
amount your second sentence, but either "W and Chelsea differ in the usual 
whatever way" (I suppose numerical non-identity, as you suggest, but not 
necessarily -- gender springs to mind, as well as age) or "Lo, a way that W 
and Chelsea differ"

<Or will you insist on using 
{le du be ce'u} there? Is {ce'u} by itself a function or does 
it depend on {le} to turn it into one?>
Well, the don't differ in {le du be ce'u}, since each is self identical and 
that function of course is the identity function -- x in, x out. (As a 
political metaphor, I might wonder if W really was self-identical, but that 
is another tale altogether.) As to the second question, neither: {ce'u} 
creaes a function of the appropriate sort (one from arguments to whatever the 
matrix is with a regular sumti) out of whatever it is stuck into as a sumti. 

<I think it is du'u/ka in conjunction with ce'u that creates the
function, not le. Is {re pendo be ce'u} also a function?>
Yes, it gives a set of friends for each argument. {du'u} and {ka} with 
{ce'u} give functions whose values are propositions and properties, 
respectively (though that has fuzzed a bit lately).

<I may come up with [a theory for the meaning of {le broda be ce'u}] 
eventually. I just don't like it as a {te frica}, which to my mind requires a 
{ka}.>

Well, remember that {frica} also takes {ni} at least, by the Refgram and the 
gismu list, and so probably {jei} as well (corresponding to the {du'u xukau} 
indirect questions). I tend to think that saying {ka} really means "some 
function of a relevant sort," from the pre-{ce'u} days.

<In English you can say: "I told him the place" or "I told him 
what the place is". I'm glad we agree (I hope) that in Lojban
you can say {mi jungau ko'a le du'u makau stuzi}, but you 
can't say {mi jungau ko'a le stuzi}. Not everyone agrees with
this, some people are quite happy to mimic English here.>

Yes, but I take that to be a feature of {djuno}, not of functions. We have 
driven it in that we can't {djuno} things, only propositions. Surely {mi 
jungau ko'a tu'a le stuzi} is OK and that is presumably what happens in 
English as well. Note, there is not {ce'u} function in any case, so not 
relevant to the present discussion.

<Now for the case where we disagree. In English we can say
"they differ in their mother" or "they differ in who their 
mother is". In Lojban we both accept {ko'a ko'e frica le ka
makau mamta ce'u}, but you also allow {ko'a ko'e frica le mamta
be ce'u}. To me this is just as unacceptable as the one above, 
for the same reason, it puts the wrong type in the place. >

(I'd still use plurals in English, since the point is that their mothers are 
different). But {frica} is not {djuno}, it has a different logic, I you will, 
a different set of requirements. We want to find something different about W 
and Chelsea and just about anything that is different will do. The ahndy way 
of doing this is to use some function that gives different values for the 
two. We could, of course, simply spell out the different values explicitly: 
{le du'u ge la babras bus mamta la dubias ginai la babras bux mamta la 
tclsys}, {le du'u la mamta be la dubias na du la mamta be la tclsys} and so 
on, but the functions are shorter and convey the same information more 
briefly -- in context. This works with {frica} but something exactly 
opposite works with {dunli} -- that is part of the difference between the two 
which has to be understood to work this deal.