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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 09:22:53 EST

In a message dated 3/3/2002 8:55:20 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> 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.
> 
Read the whole piece and note the "as it seems." But also note the cases 
cited various places where {abu} is used clearly as a name -- as historically 
it was.

<>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.>

Read the whole piece. In context it needs {me'o} to set that context, but 
the reqding is still {abu}.

<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.)>

The Lojban tradition is not to use abbreviations at all -- and not to use 
capital letters except for emphasis -- so this particular practice is very 
unLojbanic, not to mention mileading. {abu} will be either "a" or "A" 
depending on whether the shift is on or not, so it is always either one or 
the other.

<>{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.>

While it is possible to twist a case to make this look plausible, I doubt it 
is worth the effort. In none of the cases cited (and certainly not in 
spelling) is there an antecedent occurrence of some obvious reference to a 
character "a" that enables the pronoun reference to work.

<>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.)>

Read the whole paper; this passage is taken from a hypothesis 
contrary-to-fact, though I think that your response is wrongheaded and as 
irresponsible as your use of the out of context quotation.