Subject: Re: [lojban] re: nazycau gerku

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 19:58:18 -0400

At 09:30 AM 04/29/2000 -0700, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>la pycyn cusku di'e
> >How should I read the observatives (well, I don't suppose you can observe a
> >perfective)?
>
>I think you could observe a perfective sometimes:
>(ba'o carvi -- Look! It has rained!, ba'o se cikre
>-- Look! It's fixed!) but in fact usage has not
>limited the elision of the first argument to
>observatives. This elision is treated exactly like
>the elision of any other argument: the sumti is
>supposed to be obvious from context, or irrelevant.
>There is no special treatment of the x1 place.

I think the concept of the observative was always a recognition of what it 
means to elide the first place, or rather any place upon which focus or 
stress is placed. In Lojban, the first place is naturally focussed by the 
grammar associated with "le". It is plausible that there be nonobservative 
uses of omitted x1.

>In this particular example I was not baffled by the
>"observative" (the elision of x1) but by the meaning.
>What does it mean for an idea to be over and done with?
>Is it no longer an idea?

Well a cessative tense or a completitive tense suggests that it is an idea 
which has ceased (perhaps permanently) to be an idea. An obvious example 
from US history are the idea of the US as a slaveholding nation after the 
civil war. While I am sure people have thought about the idea since then, 
I suspect that no one has been able to think about it in quite the same way 
- so an idea of slavery is really a new idea.

I presume that the idea of Argentina as a Spanish colony is fairly well 
extinguished by now too %^)

If one thinks of people or the perceptions and recollections of people as 
ideas, then when the last person that knows or recalls the person is dead, 
that idea is clearly perfected. How many anonymous human beings of whom no 
record was ever made are completely lost to us, as are any ideas that they 
thought and never conveyed, or even conveyed and were forgotten.

> Or no longer held by x3?
>Or no longer being elaborated? What does {ba'o} really
>mean there?

I associate ba'o with pujecanaijebanai but having more recognition that 
there was a definite ending point to the state.

>And even assuming that {la'e di'u ba'o sidbo} could
>mean "that was the idea", then it could also mean,
>even more likely, "it was an idea". But these two
>phrases reflect almost opposite attitudes in
>English. The first reaffirms the idea, the second
>is almost an apologetic withdrawal of the idea.

Those differences are attitudinal. An idea can end and one can be happy, 
sad, apologetic about it. The attempt to resurrect or bring back a dead 
idea is probably not covered by this directly, though if one assumes that a 
resurrected idea is not necessarily the same as the original idea, it could 
be expressed that way.

>I think both are rather idiomatic, and the Lojban
>phrase would have none of those connotations.

Agreed.

>When we're presented with an English translation
>next to the Lojban, it is difficult to detect this
>kind of ambiguities, we tend to accept the given
>translation as reasonable, but sometimes we would
>read something very different in its absence.

The intralinear translations can be a weakness if they cause someone to 
read the English as being the identical things as the Lojban. That was one 
reason I always favored the stilted English translations.

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 (newly updated!)