Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: I like chocolate

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:38:57 EDT

In a message dated 8/20/2002 2:51:36 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> But then I'm saying "I like chocolate", aren't I? But I don't necessarily
> like looking at it, or its colour; it's not an abstract appreciation the 
> way
> one might like a picture in an art gallery. Eating it is what I like about
> chocolate.
> 

Well, it is not clear just what you are saying with xorxes {lo'e}, but it 
does not seem to be what you have in mind.

<<
How do you get the "several quantities at once"?

I took the {loi} from a half-remembered notion (I think it was from the
lessons) which uses {loi vanju}, with an explanation something like "one
only drinks part of the mass of all that is wine", or something like that.

>From which I generalised that {loi} is used for things which are not
discrete -- after all, I don't eat one or two chocolates in English; I eat
(some) chocolate (mass noun, not count noun). I figured it would be similar
in Lojban.

Good reasoning, but it doesn't apply to Lojban. There are no mass nouns in 
Lojban; every gismu that might be one specifies " a quantity of" (though some 
cases are harder to be sure you have a quantity of -- rather than several 
quantities of -- than others). And "mass" in Lojban ({loi} and the like) are 
not masses in that sense (well, some people sometimes think they are, but 
that view is not the usual one), but rather something more like treams: 
several individuals cooperating to do/be something that (perhaps) they could 
not individually do/be. Clearly, there is an overlap here in that the 
chocolate you like to eat is a mass even in this sense, several quantities 
coperating. But it is -- on each occasion -- also an individual, one 
quantity of chocolate (see the comment above). In neither case need it -- 
though in the first it might -- refer to chocolates, individual pieces made 
up as such. xorxes' problem with this is that, if you say, {mi nelci 
le/lo/loi cakla), then you are asserting that there is some specific bit of 
chocolate that you like {da poi cakla zo'u mi nelci da} and it then makes 
sense to ask you which one -- or, at least, go looking for it. And this is 
not what you want to claim (more in a minute)

<<
So would it be {mi nelci lo'ezu'o citka loi cakla}, then?

And can {nelci} even be used like this? The gi'uste says x2 is
(object/state), not (activity) or (event), so I'm not sure whether {zu'o} is
appropriate here. ("(state)" sounds as if {za'i} is called for -- but I
don't like the state of eating chocolate, but rather the activity.)
No, it almost certainly shouldn't be {lo'e zu'o}, though perhaps it is {lo 
zu'o} rather than {le}. It is arguable that there is, in the abstract even, 
more than one event of you eating chocolate and not all of them occur or are 
liked when they do or even would be if they did. So, you like some but not 
all events of your eating chocolate. If you say {le} at this point, the fair 
question is "which ones are those?" since you have some particular ones in 
mind. So, it is safer to say {lo}, some but unspecified. 
I take "state" in the explanations usually to mean {nu} or one of its 
subdivisions, not just {za'i}. That is a point to be clarified in some 
future edition.

<<
> On the whole, moving off into the intensional seems the right
> thing to do

I do not understand what you mean here; what does "intensional" mean?

> (and what xorxes would have {lo'e} do, usually). 
>>

For right now, the crucial thing about intensional contexts (inside the scope 
of abstractions and a few other places) is that you can't quantify out of 
them. {mi nelci lo nu mi citka lo/loi cakla} does NOT entail {da poi cakla 
zo'u mi nelci lo nu citka da}. Similarly, {mi nelci tu'a lo cakla} does not 
entail either {da poi cakla zo'u mi nelci tu'a da} or {... nelci da}. Thus 
xorxes problem is avoided without resorting to {lo'e} (whose chief function 
often is just to avoid this problem -- in xorxes' usage).