Subject: Letterals et al (was: Anything but Tautogies (and .....)...)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 10:48:04 EST

Letterals words are pronouns with the mnemonically useful characteristic that 
they contain a letter (or some such thing) that ties in with the noun being 
pro'd. Any Lojban word followed by {bu} forms a new litteral, which may not 
have that connection or has a more remote one (Would {pabu}, aside from being 
malglico, be usable for the indefinite "one", as in "one might think that"?) 
through some other character (? mark? symbol?).
(This contrasts somewhat with the Refgram which uses letteral words to refer 
to letterals, i.e., {a, b, c,...} and for which the pronominal use is 
secondary and derivative. That is, the Refgram regularly uses letteral words 
in spelling and creating acronyms, which, under the usage above, would turn 
out to be variables rather than names, since a string of letteral words is 
also a letteral word. But then it has to take this whole line back and say 
that, outside of spelling and acronyms (somehow contextually marked, one 
supposes) one can't use letteral words to talk about letterals, since this 
will conflict with the use as pronouns -- a practical decision, no doubt, but 
not totally coherent. The Refgram also notes a tendency to confuse letterals 
and letteral words -- use and mention -- which may be relevant here. )
{me'o}, whose first function is to convert a mathematical expression (a 
formula?) into a sumti (how exactly did the formula? function before?), also 
converts letterals, which are already sumti ("sumti" here means somethiing 
that can be a sumti, not something that in fact is one -- roughly "proper 
noun or description"), into names for the [character? mark? symbol? letter?] 
with which they are associated (what the cmavo list mistakenly says they mean 
originally).
Well, not quite, since at least the {bu}-formed letteral words are "more 
abstract" than (characters? marks? symbols? letters?). I am not quite sure 
what this means; it seems to go beyond token-type contrasts, even of the most 
general sort, but may not. I THINK it means something to do with functional 
equivalence (arguably still a token-type matter, like typefaces) {me'o 
zo'obu} would "humor" marker, whether a smiley-face or the Chinese character 
for "HEE-haw" or... And so, presumably, a Tengwar version of Lojban spelling 
might well contain a hook that was referred to in context as {me'o abu}. 
And, of course, we now have the problem of what to do about letterals when 
they are used in mathematical expressions: does {me'o} turn them into names 
of letters or mathematical sumti as unevaluated mathematical entities? 
Maybe we have to go yet another step to get to the names of letterals 
themselves?

Test question: when you write out what is said as {abu prami by} is the 
written form exactly the same or is it {a prami b}? Why? What about the 
Lojban for "CIA"?

I find this all rather muddled; can someone please clarify it a bit?