Subject: Re: [lojban] Letteral, letter words and symbols.

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 02:51:54

la pycyn cusku di'e

>a
>
>So, what is the situation in Lojban? The character just above the previous
>character is a letteral. The name of that character is, so it seems, a
>letteral word, in this case {abu}.

That's where we disagree. {abu} is not the name of the character,
it is a pronoun. At least in any grammatical Lojban text.

>When this character is written in some
>formulaic context is is read as {abu}.

Not within the grammar of Lojban, which in general does
not permit to easily read out any formulas. You have to
MEXify them if you want to read them using a grammatical
utterance.

>But this character cannot be written
>in a language context, for it is almost always going to lead to an 
>ambiguity
>-- mistaken for the word {a} which has more liberty of occurrence than the
>article in English and can occur almost anywhere that abu as a character
>could.

That's why the character "A" is a much more convenient abbreviation
for the word "abu" than the character "a".

(BTW, even in "character name mode", {abu} by itself is neither
"a" nor "A". It depends on whether or not the case shift has been
locked to uppercase (with ga'e) or not.)

>{la'e lu abu li'u cu lerfu} The referent of
>{abu} is a letteral (17.10.6, said to be correct, but whether true or just
>grammatical is unclear).

In some context, the pronoun {abu} can refer to the letteral.
But {abu} as a pronoun, not as a name. The distinction can be
blurred in Lojban thanks to the abundance of pronouns that allows
each letteral to have a different pronoun for itself.

>So, {abu blabi} might be about a particular
>occurrence of the letteral (on a neon sign, say) or it might be about 
>Alice,
>or someone else recently referred to with an a-description.

Yes. In English it would be "it's white", but Lojban gives more
clues as to what "it" might refer to than English, a particular
occurrence of the letteral being a strong candidate in some
context. (The particular occurrence might be "a", "A", or other
variants of the letteral.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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