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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 12:14:29 +0000

>>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 10/30/01 11:08pm >>>
#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 forit
#>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.  

IOW, "lo djacu pa mei cu du lo djacu re mei" is true, but 
"ro djacu pa mei cu du lo djacu re mei" is false.

#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?)

Indeed. As I said to John, the existence of problematic borderline cases
is evidence of a definition of the borderline.

#>#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?

Firstly because it could obviate the need for teminators in many cases.
Secondly because it would make tanru-internal groupings clearer through
to-me more straightforward and sometimes shorter structures (I still haven't
learnt the rules for bo, ke, ke'e, whereas I learnt be, bei, be'o on day 1 of
studying Lojban).

--And.