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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 10:01:37 EDT

In a message dated 10/8/2002 9:55:41 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> Jordan:
> > I mean that they *mean* the same things. "Semantic difference" as
> > you're thinking of it, sure. But "gleki leza'i broda" and ".ui
> > broda" *mean* the same thing in a real conversation (or at least
> > they would most of the time).
> 
> You mean that even though the sentences have different truthconditional
> meaning, speakers will generally intend to communicate the same
> information when uttering them.
>>
Thanks for answering my next question before I got around to asking it; I'm 
sure you are right -- on the reading of Jordan, though less so on the reading 
of Lojban. The English muddle -- frequently acknowledged -- is an *English* 
(maybe even an SAE) muddle; it need not be a Lojban one. And Lojban is 
described to stop it being a Lojban one; let's go with that. So far as I can 
tell, Lojban does not allow, for example, a question to be directive other 
than to an answer. So the "Yes/ No" response to "May I have the sugar?," 
which is either witty or rude in English, is merely correct in Lojban for the 
direct Lojban translation {xu mi pilno le sakta}, and cannot arise for the 
more sensitive translation {e'o mi pilno le sakta}, which gets {ai[nai]}, not 
{[na]go'i}. Admittedly, {ai[nai]} is also a reading of "Yes/No" but not the 
one intended in the "joke." Similar differences might be maintained for 
attitudinals, I should hope.