Subject: RE: [lojban] Selma'o (was irregularities...)

From: "Craig" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 20:12:30 -0500

>> Imagine that prior to reading the Book, Jimbob learns about selma'o. So
he
>> asks me, "What selma'o is .ui in?" I tell him, "UI." He asks what UIs do,
>> and I say that all but one of them show emotions,..

>The correct answer is "selma'o don't _do_ anything; they are about form,
>not function. It just so happens that many cmavo from the same selma'o
>also have similar functions, but that's never been an intention of the
>language design." This isn't really a complicated idea, and I'm as
>baffled as others here why you seem to have trouble with it.

>It would actually be _dishonest_ to try to acheive some kind of clean
>association between grammar and semantics. Among our purposes is to
>learn about the nature of language; any pre-conceptions we bring to
>that task limit what we can learn. For example, in order to get the
>software parser to work, we had to create selma'o. In order to express
>certain things, we had to put certain words in those salma'o: the
>fact that we ended up with different meanings in them _is an interesting
>result_ of our work; if we had come in with a pre-conceived notion of
>grammatical groups corresponding to semantic function, we wouldn't
>have made that discovery.

>It's much like what David Friedman says about his economic analysis
>of law: some people ask him why he puts the benefit of crime into his
>equations; he does so because he wants to see how the equations come
>out without influencing them. If it turns out from his analysis that
>certain laws work to deter crime, that's an interesting result. If
>it turns out that certain laws don't, that too is interesting. But
>you can't get an honest result if you start with the answer before
>you ask the question.

I rather like this explanation. While I still don't like it, I now at least
understand why the selma'o are as they are. This does not mean you have
convinced me that they should be how they are, but it does mean that it
makes enough sense that I will shut up about it now regardless of what is
said on this issue. But thank you all very much for at least taking the time
to listen to my ideas, even if you still don't understand them.

--la kreig.daniyl.

'.i do cu vanci le ba panje xusra
.i denci gunma le se gidva'

xy.sy. gubmau ckiku nacycme: 0x5C3A1E74