Subject: RE: [lojban] lo'edu'u

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 23:58:36 -0000

Nick, this was a beautiful exposition of myopic singularization.
Can you put it on the wiki?

> So where does this lo'e merko d00d live? How many kids has she got? Did
> he cheat on his taxes last year? Do you think she'll go out with me?

S/he probably will if you squint enough. Failing that, s/he
probably has a friend or sibling who will.

> The details of what you can and cannot claim of this phantom
> generalisation figure are still hazy;

And, I contend, are contingent on one's own metaphysics, not on
the semantics of {lo'e}. Therefore we don't have a duty to dehaze.

> The whole point of squinting is to see one mooshy glob instead of five
> hundred sharp focus individuals. If you can still discern two or three,
> you're not squinting hard enough. And there's not much point in
> counting when there can be only one thing to count. tu'o is the
> non-number; it's the refusal to count. So it's been invoked in this
> cause too

Yes. The idea behind the use of tu'o is that it is a dummy quantifier.
As explained on the wiki on the "tu'o" page, use of "tu'o" would
generally violate Gricean principles except when the category has
only one member. Hence one infers from "tu'o broda" that there is
only one broda. [If these technical remarks lead to further discussion
I'll post replies to Jboske.]

> One last step. At the last minute, Lojban introduced a distinction
> between {nu}, stuff that happens in the world, and {du'u}, claims about
> the world, concepts about what's going on. Languages sometimes
> distinguish between them, but not as routinely as Lojban does. If
> something is {nu}, it's not {du'u}; and vice versa. If you want
> something covering both, you use {su'u}. I doubt most Lojbanists know
> su'u is even there; and as I said in the lessons, I think they should,
> because people may well not want to make the nu/du'u distinction

The snag with {su'u} is that it can be seen not only as neutralizing
the nu/du'u distinction, but also ka/ni/jei etc., and they are so
heterogeneous that {su'u} ends up seeming frighteningly vague.
[Followups to Jboske.]

> Is this tinkering? Is this casuistry? Is this pedantry? No, lojbanists.
> This is Lojban. The minute you let {lo'e} into the language alongside
> {le}, and {du'u} alongside {nu}, you create a distinction. If you
> ignore that distinction, you are misusing Lojban, as surely as if you
> say {re} instead of {pa}. English uses 'that' for {lenu}, {lo'enu},
> {lo'edu'u}, {loisu'u}, and any number of other possibilities. Lojban
> requires a distinction. {le} presupposes you can count the referents.
> {nu} presupposes the referent is an event. If you always say {lenu}
> where you should be saying {lo'edu'u} instead, you're just calquing
> 'that'. You're not thinking Lojbanically. And if you wanted English..

I confess that I am still in gobsmacked shock at such vehement
endorsement of ideas that I have become so inured to almost
everybody ignoring or deprecating. I'm not sure that agreeing
with me is a good political move in a consensus-building exercise,
mind you....

> Should I have realised this was going on a long time ago? I suppose so;
> but when the jboskeists say this stuff, people tune out, and that's a
> shame. We need fluffy pedagogy to prevent this; I'm starting to think
> that's my real job in Lojban. (If I can't become a lecturer, I'll try
> the next best thing...) Am I happy about this realisation? No. It makes
> Lojban even nastier than I'd have liked.

You may not be happy, but I am. CLL represented a gigantic leap forward
in the genesis of Lojban, but the lojbanologically minded have long
realized that it was only the first step, if the formalist dimension
to the Loglan project was to progress from intention to actuality. If
you are willing to assume the woldemarian mantle, then the prospects for
Lojban's future have just increased a thousandfold. That sounds
a little hyperbolical, I concede, but when you consider how CLL is
pretty much universally treated as scripture, it's clear what an
impact it would have if you parlayed jboskological lore into
further scripture -- a nicolaitan new testament, as it were, to the
woldemarian old.

> Is the language changing every month these days? Actually it is.

"Growing, developing, evolving, maturing" might be less threatening
terms than "changing".

> Two
> years ago, people weren't using {ce'u}, and were using {ka} a lot more.
> Not because we've been tinkering with the language, but because we're
> understanding more of the semantics of this language, and moving
> steadily away from literal code substitutions of English. This will
> keep happening. And this is the kind of thing both formalists and
> Sapir-Whorfists (to use xod's recent wiki term) should welcome: Lojban
> not being a code for English, but making subtler, weirder
> differentiations. Does this mean we have to unlearn stuff? Yeah. But
> this is different from tinkering. This is us reading the baseline more
> closely, and realising its consequences more fully. This is us staying
> longer and longer in Lojbanistan, and starting to pick up some of the
> idiom. This is trumping past usage and custom; but it *is* sticking by
> the baseline (which trumps usage anyway), and it's what we're here for

Very eloquently said.

--And.