Subject: Re: [lojban] On functions to various types of things.

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 17:19:04 EDT

<Sigh!> Irony is dead. The point of the "proposal" was to be so absurd that 
everyone would say "Wait! Why clutter up everything that is working fine just 
to feel comfortable about one case that is just like all the rest but gives 
me the creepies" and we could go on about the business. Now we have someone 
taking the "suggestion" seriously and rejecting it across the board because 
it doesn't look grammatical (though it is), another person noting that it is 
grammatical but rejecting it because (well, I'm not exacrly sure, but mainly 
I think) because it ain't the way we used to do it (though the one case has 
not been done before). And finally someone (or both of these two, actually) 
proposing setting the one case out specially again (thereby missing the whole 
point -- again) to be treated in Mex. So, all I can do is recommend treating 
all functions, except {ka}, which already has a special mark, in MEX. Which 
ain't the way we used to do it but is at least consistent and coherent. Is 
old {ka} now {na'u du'u} or {du'u na'u}? I think it may make a difference in 
dealing with indirect questions, but either is so ugly it hardly matters.

&:
<> One of the virtues elsewhere has been that the form marked the sort of 
> thing that came out as values {du'u} and propositions, {ni} and qunatities, 
> and so on.   

I can see the force of this argument and the virtue of keeping it in mind
when seeking ways to refer to functions that, when applied, yield sumti.>

Most of these critters yield sumti in their regular use; this is not a 
special case.

<1. Lojban has no way to express the mother-of function applied to an 
argument.

When I said this before, you replied:
> <I 
> applied function rather than only as a predicate. E.g. if *{mamta la 
> djan} functioned as a sumti that referred to the mother of John. That 
> seems to be how you conceive of {le mamta be la djan}, but really that 
> means "x is such that it is nonveridically said to be the case that x 
> mamta la djan", where x is not bound by a quantifier.> 
>
> Well, as you are wont to say, that *is* how Lojban uses {mamta} as an 
> applied function.  That role may not follow strictly from the literal 
> meaning of the terms but it is a role that the expression plays -- look 
> at a clear case like {le sumji be le re li mu}. (I would argue that "is 
> non-veridically said to be" is suspect loading, "that the speaker is using" 
> is safer, for the speaker may use it just because it is the veridical thing 
> to say -- and usually does, byt the way).   

"le sumji" is a poor choice of gadri, though I concede that it is hallowed
by usage. At any rate, we seem to agree that Lojban has no way to express 
the mother-of function applied to an argument, and that in those circumstances
where we would use a way to express the mother-of function applied to an 
argument, if we had such a way, we instead use "le mamta be" (or similar
with some other gadri).>

As I have said -- while conceding taht {le} is saddled with all kinds of 
problems, but pointing to its traditonal usage -- {le mamta be ...} is 
exactly how Lojban deals with the mother-of function applied to an argument.  
The problem is to find a way to talk about the mother-of function all by 
itself, as we talk about the is-big function or the size function so easily. 
We also want to do it in a way that parallels these othre cases, since they 
occur in parallel situations (pur storeies about W and Jeb and Chelsea, for 
the most part, so far). 

<2. Lojban's prime exemplars of functions are its mex operators, and Lojban
provides a way to convert a selbri to operator: {na'u mamta}. (I don't see
that we need {na'u mamta (be?) ce'u}.)>

Actually, these have almost never been used and are certainly a lot less 
common than {ce'u} functions built from ordinary predicates

<3. There seems to be no easy way to convert an operator to a sumti. Does 
{li} tolerate an operandless operator as complement -- {li na'u mamta}?
Otherwise, {li ni'e nu'a na'u mamta} converts from operator to sumti.>

{li} is jsut the sort of thing that I was afraid might happen with Lojbab's 
suggestion, though I am happy to see that Lojbab doesn't accept it. For the 
final case you give, I'm not sure you need {ni'e}, then the {nu'a na'u} 
cancel out and the {li} , bing inappropriate, is relaced by {le} to get what 
we started with in the friest place {le mamta}. And Farmer Brown is geting 
angry with all the troops gallumphing in his barnyard.

<4. The applied function could be expressed as {li na'u mamta mo'e la djan}.>

Or, in a rare flash of sanity, {le mamta be la djan}.

lojbab:

<So any time you want formal expression and it isn't a simple predicate or 
one of the ornamentations thereof that we designed into the language, Mex 
is the way to go - or at least we hope so.>

Of course, I am inclined to say that this is just one of those ornamentations 
designed into the langauge and point to all the cases where it is so used, 
wondering why it cannot be used in this most basic place.

<>1. Lojban has no way to express the mother-of function applied to an 
argument.

This is notationally
y=mother(x)
correct?

If so, then it is precisely mekso, and you can convert the predicate with 
ce'u as a single thing, or convert all the pieces to an Polish notation 
expression with "mamta" as the operator and 1 operand for the x2 (this 
loses the number-of-arguments semantics info since it is purely notational 
and the functions can have arbitrary numbers of arguments)>

I'd like to see the Lojban here, the shifting this and calling it that 
described has left me in a dither about just what I should actually SAY.

<>3. There seems to be no easy way to convert an operator to a sumti.

You can convert ANYTHING in Mex.  You probably want to use me'o and leave 
the operands unfilled.>

Well, not, not {me'o na'u mamta}, since that is just the expression; rather 
{la'e me'o na'u mamta}. Will someone please tell me why all this trouble for 
this particular issue when all the corresponding ones, with every other kind 
of value, are dealt with just by putting {ce'u} in where the arguments go.