Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: BPFK phpbb

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 08:27:52 -0400

At 12:00 PM 4/30/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>Someone someday is going the face up to the fact that de facto
>grammar of {kau} is that it can follow any question word, but
>not meaningfully anything else, and write a grammar accordingly,
>using whatever formalism best gets the job done. And so forth, for
>the entire de facto grammar of the language.

First of all, UI is a single selma'o in name only, just as PA is. Each 
really is several selma'o all with essentially identical grammars but often 
drastically different semantic natures. Thus we have the groupings UIn in 
the cmavo lists, though even they were not analytically determined, but 
rather were groupings for lexicon learning benefit to make studying members 
of a large group easier by breaking them down into semantically similar 
groups as well as a miscellaneous group. Both UI and PA originally had 
explicit grammars for restricting the ordering of these subgroupings, but 
the restrictions proved insupportable.

Next, kau (as designed) is not limited to question words, even though that 
may be what current usage norms are.

The reason kau was put in UI was that at the time it was added, we kept 
finding new places where it was useful, and could not come up with a reason 
why semantics might not be able to apply it to ANY usage.

In most cases, kau following non-question words is similar in meaning to 
kau following the question word corresponding to the selma'o that is 
marked. Early history will likely show "dakau" used as often as makau, and 
there may even have been usages of things like "mikau". Thus it is only 
when kau follows a word *or construct* that has no corresponding 
question-word that there is no clear basis for meaning. The fact that kau 
can apply leftwise to a construct as well as to an individual word made it 
quite UI-like (as well as quite free-modifier like, I'll admit).

Since we do not have a GRAMMATICAL restriction against any selma'o having a 
corresponding question word, there can be no grammatical restriction on 
kau. Thus it needed to go in UI rather than as a selma'o of its own in the 
free modifier grammar.

NAI was NOT the same, because NAI already had two roles in the 
language. Its use in preparsed logical connectives was deemed incompatible 
with its use in UI. "a nai" is neither a contrary nor contradictory 
negation of a.

I all likelihood, if NAI had not been used in logical connectives, it would 
indeed have been merged with CAI, which basically is the same as merging 
with UI. However, I note that in early Lojban formal grammar, UI grammar 
WAS explicitly in formal grammar, including the substructure of 
combinations of UI, CAI, and NAI. It was removed only when it was argued 
(possibly by Cowan, but this may have predated him) that properly we would 
have to put a rule for attitudinals after every construct, and the version 
of YACC that we had simply couldn't handle that many rules. (We were 
constantly pushing against the limits of available YACC versions throughout 
the 16-bit era).

People can say that the multiple use of NAI violated the design principles 
of the language, but the bottom line is that it was solidly enshrined in 
Loglan long before I got involved, and the sacredness of that particular 
design principle was less firmly enforced in JCB's world than in redesigned 
Lojban.

I'm not sure whether I can elucidate the argument clearly, but I see too 
much similarity between the argument (Jorges?) for nai in UI, with the 
arguments for and against prepositions on place structures. (JCB 
experimented with case tags for places in TLI Loglan and we rejected them 
as being the reintroduction of prepositions.)

While to some extent it is true that "nai" is polysemous between contrary, 
contradictory, and something else (in logical connectives), the proper 
solution in the past for Lojban has been to split the usage into multiple 
cmavo, NOT freeing up the grammar. The polysemy of nai is quite a bit 
short of the polysemy of prepositions in natural language; for one thing, I 
think that nai is consistent in meaning with any one selma'o (or group of 
words within a complex selma'o - Im not going to try to figure out whether 
kaunai is a scalar negation of kau just because uinai is a scalar negation 
of ui); defining that polysemy in a dictionary is thus a tractable problem, 
even though it is a relative pain.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org