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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 12:38:24 +0100

pc:
[email-masked] writes:
#<<
#> I
#> think I understand how Jorge's {lo'e} is supposed to work, but
#> I'm not yet convinced that {lo'e} is the right solution to generalize
#> over all examples that have popped up in discussion.
#Do tell us. The worst that is likely to happen is that xorxes says (as he 
#does with all my tries) that that is not it at all. He may even try to 
#explain why not (anything is possible).
#I agree that some of the cases that muddy the water are probably wrongly 
#included, but I have trouble -- since I can't get a straight answer on what 
#any of them mean -- which ones (but I am pretty sure about {pixra lo'e 
#sincrboa}).

I would rather wait to get a canonical corpus of exx from Jorge. 

#<<
##I suppose you mean {se li'i}, "I'm a visual experiencer of
##something being a boa".
##>>
##No, I meant {li'i} though I left out the {le} . Apparently the meaning has 
##changed since the word was created by someone who lived primarily in a 
##disembodied experiental mode.
#It hasn't changed its meaning AFAIK. It's just that "viska lo li'i" means
#"see an experience", not "have an experience of seeing". That doesn't
#mean there's no way to say "have the experience of seeing", though.
#>>
#I am not sure about {viska lo li'i ...} meaning "has a visual experience of", 
#but I think that is about right.  

Since "viska ko'a" means "see ko'a", "viska lo li'i" should mean "see an
experience" (which is not the same thing as "has a visual experience").

#The word {li'i} was devised by a paraplegic 
#(as far as I can remember, anyhow) who experience many events but could 
#participate in none. The term was devised to allow him to express his view 
#of the world -- and also be an aid in dealing withm delusional states and 
#illusory presentations (the Indian chestnut about the snake and the rope got 
#translated rather nicely using it, I recall.) Of course, this was in Loglan, 
#but {li'i} was taken over -- at least originally -- directly and explicitly.

All of this is true (though the story I was told involved an amputee, iirc).
However, as implemented in Lojban, "I experience having a leg" is
{da li'i de tuple mi/?ce'u kei mi}. I personally think

mi lifri lo ka'e nu da tuple mi
mi lifri lo su'o mu'ei nu da tuple mi
mi lifri lo ka'e tuple be mi
mi lifri lo su'o mu'ei tuple be mi

would all work too. For "hava a visual experience of a unicorn", I'd say:

mi viska zei lifri lo ka'e pavyseljirna
mi viska zei lifri lo su'o mu'ei pavyseljirna

#<<
#IMO, the Lojban technical term "abstraction" is primarily grammatical
#rather than semantic -- an event is indeed no more abstract than 
#a participant in an event. So really "abstraction" just means "selmaho
#NU". {tu'a ko'a} is therefore an abbreviation for {le su'u ko'a co'e},
#no more and no less. 
#>>
#Well, one of the lines that led to the present mess was my claiming -- on the 
#basis of both CLL and some logical conveniences -- that {nu} and {du'u} 
#expressions had more in common than just grammar. That was, of course, in 
#the midst of the token/type argle-bargle, now happily irrelevant. Since all 
#events always exist in Lojban, they are surely somewhat more abstract than 
#objects -- they exist even when the objects in them don't, for example. Just 
#like propositions in that respect. And properties. So far as I can see, the 
#releative abstractness of various referents plays no real role in the present 
#problem.  

That's right: when Jorge was saying that "tu'a X" introduces another level of
abstraction, he was meaning basically that it embeds X within an implicit
subordinate bridi.

--And.