Subject: Re: [lojban] ce'u once again

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 17:16:59 EDT

In a message dated 4/10/2002 3:35:12 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Well, I'm not sure that this is the type of logic that's at the heart
> of a Logical Language, it's more like simplicity and analogousness. At
> any rate, Lojban is hardly a perfect loglan, the addition of this
> feature will have to wait for the next generation.
> 

It is, of course, exactly the type of logic that is behind loglans: the 
grammar of the language is meant to be patterned on that of First Order 
Predicate Logic (Principia Mathematica or so). The rest of the "logical" 
part is later additions and vain and misguided hopes (and not related to 
Sapir-Whorf neither, since that is about grammar).

<Probably analogy to English grammar and lack of thoughly thinking it
through.>

Sadly plausible, alas.

<There are other problems; if 'le' is followed by a bridi, then the
sumti would almost always need an explicit terminator, to avoid
swallowing the next sumti, but it might be possible to work something
out.>

Not obvious, since it doesn't happen now and the change is insignificant 
(indeed, non-existent, so far as I can see -- well, if you allow delayed 
connections to LE, ...). Notice that I would expect some visible differences 
between sumti in a sumti bridi and those in a sentential or predicate bridi 
-- in this case not dropping the fundamental hooks, {be/bei} (it turns out 
that the selbri in a sumti has to be a degenerate tanru to get these things 
in! hysteron proteron).