Subject: Re: [lojban] lo'e and NAhEBO

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2001 17:18:04 -0500

At 08:00 PM 11/25/01 +0100, G. Dyke wrote:
>again I'm asking a question about lo'e:
>
>let's say that the concept expressed by lo'e/le'e broda is that of the mode
>of a set and call it "typical."
>
>is lo'e/le'e broda "one or more of all the things that are typical brode"/
>"all of the at least one thing I'm calling a typical brode"?
>
>so lo'e ropno bangu = English or French or German or Spanish (or Italian)
>and le'e ropno bangu = SAE

This is what I had in mind, I think, when I came up with the pair, though I 
would also consider proto-Indo-European to be lo'e ropno bangu even though 
there almost certainly was no single language that matched what we describe 
by that name (in other words, the referent of lo'e need not exist provided 
that it bears the critical traits that make it typical; the referent of 
le'e almost never exists, since it is an idealized extreme of typicality, 
as well as one that is specific to the communication taking place as with 
other "le" family words).

>or is lo'e broda "the typical member of the set of the things that actually
>are broda"?

I'm not sure I see how this differs from the above, except for excluding 
the non-existent "typical".

>the latter conforms (I think) with the idea of the mode of lo'i broda, but
>the former makes more sense
>
>my apologies if you feel I could have read through the posts of a couple of
>weeks back and got my answer

I'm not sure any consensu was reached (as usual).

>My second question: why is it that the refgram makes a big deal of NAhEBO
>(It certainly made a big impression on me) but it is almost never used.

Because it is not especially useful, though it completes the set of things 
that can be said. We occasionally use its equivalent in English, but not 
commonly.

> Am I
>wrong in thinking that na'ebo le broda is the same as le na'e broda?

Well, let us look at the above to see the difference.

na'ebo lo'e ropno bangu
means "other-than the typical European language (would be needed in this 
position in order to make the bridi true)"

lo'e na'eke ropno bangu [ke'e]
means "the typical other-than-[European-language]"

The latter is a typical thing that is not a European language - not a 
particularly useful concept because it need not have anything to do with a 
language, whereas "lo'e na'e ropno bangu" (the typical non-European 
language) might be more useful.

But the na'ebo lo'e ropno is a negation of a sumti reference, whereas "lo'e 
na'ebo ..." is indeed a sumti reference, albeit defined by what it isn't.

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