Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 11:32:01 EDT

In a message dated 10/6/2002 7:07:18 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes, quoting pc quoting him:

<<
> > This is the oldest screw-up in Lojban (and Loglan before it). People who 
> > can't tell UI from "I am ... that..." bridi are suffering from the 
> original 
> > malglico and clearly have not yet earned the right to play with the 
> language. 
> > They just need to be gently asked which they really mean (Do you care 
> how I 
> > feel or do you care that ...?) and reminded how to say the one they want. 
> 
> > This is a clear case of the parse (often) not giving the intended 
> meaning. 
> > And all the bad usage in the world will not change that.
> 
> Ok, I read the above paragraph about 4 times, and I can't make heads
> or tails of it. Clearly it is intended to be insulting, but you
> wrote it so poorly I have no idea what you're even complaining
> about, which just makes it look asinine. However, I'll give you
> the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually *are* talking about
> *something*, however incoherently.
> 
> Would you like to try again?
>>
Sure. Sorry if I lived up to my reputation for opacity. It was not meant to 
be insulting, merely descriptive, with the presecriptive consequences of 
that, as per my printed view on mucking up Lojban as received (no deviations 
until it is clear that you can do it right and are deliberately fiddling: 
xorxes can do it, I can't).
Since 1976 (at least -- I think I have seen earlier cases), students of 
Loglan/Lojban ahve mixed up attitudinals and predicates of attitude, {ui 
[bridi]} and {mi gleki le nu [bridi]} as a standard example. The source of 
this seems to be that English has no -- or very few -- attitudinals and fills 
the gap with expressions that look like claims about the speaker's attitude 
toward something: "I am happy that [sentence]," to stick with the same case. 
To see that this is not the claim it looks like, it is usually sufficient to 
say something like "No, you aren't" to someone who says it. If s/he is 
bemused by this response or takes it as a strange way of saying "It is not 
the case that [sentence]" -- that is, gives evidence relevant to [sentence] 
rather than to his/her state of mind -- then this was an attitudinal use of 
"I am happy that" in English, one correctly translated by {ui}. If, on the 
other hand, he gives a defense relevant to showing how he feels about 
[sentence] -- how it ties in with his goals, that [sentence] is the souce his 
grin, etc. -- then the "I am happy that" is descriptive and translates as {mi 
gleki le nu...}. No amount of (mis)usage is going to change this, since it 
is hardwired into the grammar ({ui} may disappear, as many good attitudinals 
seem to have done in English, but it will not become a claim maker. I 
suppose {mi gleki le nu} could eventually become as attitudinal, as it did 
in English, but only if UI fell into dissuetude.

The rest is just the standard policy for dealing with the error. Ascertain 
that it was an error, that the user really meant to say the other thing, and 
then gently (two-by- fours are OK after a few recurrences, but dynamite is 
never appropriate) remind the misuser of the distinction and how to make it.