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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 13:51:36 EDT

In a message dated 9/24/2001 11:10:18 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Much though I rue it, I remain much in the dark about the formals of lambda,
> but I do believe it is clear that just as
> 
> ka ce'u prami ce'u
> 
> denotes the relation between x and y such that x loves y, so 
> 
> ka ce'u prami le mamta be ce'u
> 
> denotes the relation between x and y such that x loves a mother of y, and
> likewise, just as
> 
> ka da prami ce'u 
> 
> is the property of being beloved, so
> 
> ka da prami le mamta be ce'u
> 
> is the property of having a mother who is beloved. Probably Jorge has
> said all this already, but I am certainly one of those conservatives who 
> thinks ce'u belongs to the localmost grammatical bridi. (Actually, I
> think it belongs to the localmost ka/du'u/?si'o and not any old bridi
> or abstraction, but that's not relevant to the point at issue.)
> 
> Anyway, I retain my faith in Jorge as the voice of reason and (tho less
> immoderately than I would wish) of Reason.
> 

Well, much as I hate to put Logic up against Reason (I have less worry about 
yours or xorxes' reason), it does seem to work out diffferently, and the 
things that you have said actually seem to support that view (not unusual: 
Quine once wrote a paper that clearly recommended a certain logical device 
but which he claimed ever after refuted that use definitively). If we shift 
back to lambda (and I admit I haven't messed with this for thirty odd years), 
what you want in the first case is ^x^y Lxm<y>, where both lambdas are on the 
sentence level. I would read your sentence as ^xLx^ym<y>, where one lambda 
is on the term level, creating the name of a function just as the first does 
of a property. 
Clearly, we need a way of saying ^xf<x> in Lojban and we need an explanation 
for {le broda be ce'u} in Lojban. The analogy with the abstractors other 
than {ka} suggests that the two problems have the same solution, i.e., that 
the expression is the way to express the function. Xorxes, I suppose, wants 
the function to have an initial flag, like {ka}, though of a rather different 
nature. You want {ce'u} to be transitive over some contexts, though not over 
others (else the extension-claims explanation of indirect questions will get 
into trouble -- the set of answers one as well, of course). Maybe the only 
context involved is bare LE, without NU (but I wonder if the analogies won't 
render actual cases of {nu} suspect to you too). Or perhaps your point is 
that {ce'u} is only sensible in the scope of an abstraction -- an maybe only 
certain abstractions at that. How do you feel about {la djoun mamta ce'u}, 
for example, or {nu da mamta ce'u}? They are grammatical and have natural 
clear interpretations: do you reject them or give them different 
interpreations or what?