Subject: Re: [lojban] a construal of lo'e & le'e

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 18:08:51 -0500

At 02:41 PM 10/30/01 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> >>> John Cowan <[email-masked]> 10/29/01 07:39pm >>>
>#And Rosta wrote:
>#> Eh? What am I missing? -- "pa djacu cu du lo djacu" seems wholly true.
>#
>#Should have been "pa djacu cu du re djacu"
>
>Well, Jorge has shown why that's false. We need to change it in order for it
>to make the point you want:
>
> lo djacu pa mei cu du lo djacu re mei
>
>and this I would say is TRUE.

It is less than fully true; there are instances of djacu pamei, 
specifically molecules or whatever we wish to consider djacu selci, the 
smallest chunks of water that display the necessary properties to call it 
"djacu", that are pamei and not remei. But that minimum size is rather 
fuzzily defined whereas the minimum size of lo remna selci is fairly clear 
in that we don't call a single person a twosome, or an amputee a 
less-than-onesome, but it becomes less clear how we might count a human who 
has had a heart transplant from another human (as compared to if it is a 
chimpanzee or an artificial heart?)

>#> #(Oy, I curse the day that I decided to merge selma'o DU and GOhA.)
>#>
>#> Why?
>#
>#Because tanru with du are useless, and it would have been more Zipfy
>#not to have to use "cu" in sentences like that.
>
>Indeed. But more generally, it would be interesting to get statistics on 
>the frequency of cu compared to the frequency of tanru (or at least the 
>frequency of cu to avoid parsing as tanru). If I'd been designing the
>language my gut feeling would have been to do all tanru by means of co, 
>or, better, by a co-analogue of be/bei/be'o.

Zipf rules. JCB liked tanru. So do I. Why make them harder to say, oh ye 
who seeks abbreviated forms?

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