Subject: Re: [lojban] centripetality: subset vs component

From: PILCH Hartmut <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 21:30:37 +0000 (/etc/localtime)

> >In real-life, a certain day is a component of a month, just like a key is
> >a component of a keybox.
> >
> >However when I say "the 20th" I don't refer to a certain day,
> 
> When I say "the 20th" I am ALWAYS referring to a certain day. Absent the 
> context, it may not be clear to you what day that certain day is.

Yes, that is how it should be said.
In my mind I am referring to a certain day, but my utterance specifies a
large set of days, from which the listener must find what I am referring
to by some kind of restriction: either context based or based on a
container attribute which I specify.

> When I say Hartmut, I am referring to a certain person, one of several 
> possible people. There is a large (albeit not nearly infinite) number of 
> people I could be referring to, but context usually says which one. If I 
> need to add more information, I include a surname, which in all but a 
> couple of Oriental languages is added at the end in human language use (I 
> note that you reverse the order in your computer name, so at least you are 
> consistent).

Here only the Oriental language have a habit that is conformant to human
thinking: putting the important thing up-front. Contrary to what you say
below.

> This follows the convention of putting the most critical, relevant, or 
> interesting information up front. Additional clarifying information, if 
> needed, is added later.

The most critical information is that, which the *recipient* needs first
in order to narrow down the set of possible meant objects.

If there are several possible Hartmuts, then 'Pilch' is the critical part. 
If I am already in the Pilch family, then 'Pilch' is no part at all,
because people will call me by the given name.

You can easily verify that by sorting a name list. The critical thing
comes first in sorting. How do you sort? By surname or by given name?

Try sorting dates or addresses. Or imagine yourself to be a postman who
has to forward a letter. If you are at a USA Central Post Office, then
what is the critical information you ask for: 

- to which zip code area should I bring the letter?
or
- to which house number should I bring the letter? 

> Standard order tanru are unlike names because they can have a unitary 
> meaning quite distinct from the final term - not all tanru are restrictive 
> (see the many forms of tanru in the appropriate chapter of the reference 
> Book). In cases of restriction, Grician relevance supports putting the key 
> information up front.
> 
> >We have here the notions of subset vs component, which are easy to
> >confuse.
> 
> Not especially, but I don't see why either is relevant to dates which are 
> names for days. It is pure convention that makes days be labelled with 
> numbers or associated with month names.

1 It is a convention that evolves by abbreviation
2 The choice determines the speed and efficiency of thinking
namely the need or not of transposing in one's mind

> >It is good language design to expand tanru by prepending rather than by
> >appending, because in address constructions (including places, names,
> >dates etc) the subset-specifier is usually also a container, and it is a
> >necessity of human thinking to proceed from the container to the
> >contained.
> 
> Why would anyone think that? The norm of human thinking is to proceed from 
> the most relevant, adding less relevant information if needed for a more 
> complete or accurate picture.

The most relevant part is the outermost container that is still needed for
restricting the meaning. In order to find a point in space/time, I need
to narrow it down from some radius, which depends on where I stand.

The western centrifugal addressing is of course based on language habits,
but it also happens to be a somewhat egocentric (sorry for the moral
valuation) habit, because it scorns the need of the recipient and takes
the needs of the speaker as the criterion for deciding which information
is most important. It is a positioning from the perspective of the ego,
not the perspective of the person who needs to find something.

> >Computers can use little-endian, because they are independent
> >of time. Human thinking cannot procede in a little-endian manner, because
> >time has only one direction.
> 
> You have a very limited mind then.

I am limited by time. When a see a little endian expression, my mind has
to use something like the following instruction-set in order to gather
information:

(1) recognise that an address construction is coming and switch
into collecting mode
(2) store piece by piece the innermost parts (such as house number 
in some unknown street in some unknown place), memorize them
(3) watch out for the point when I reach the radius that is relevant
for my distance (e.g. US Central Post Office). This point may
come all of a sudden, because, in the case of some African address
I may never recognize at which of the many unknown inner levels
I could be, until I suddenly hear the name "Republic of Congo" and
realise that the relevant radius is "the whole world". 
(4) Construct the mail forwarding route by reversing the order of
the stored elements, which I must have kept in memory, or, in 
case of a foreign address, discard those elements and forward
the letter to the Congo Central Post Office. 

> >One will always start at a certain container
> >level and proced inwards to the center from there (centripetal).
> 
> No one will not. One will start at whatever level is most relevant to 
> one's frame of reference, and either move in to examine details or move out 
> to "look at the big picture".

One cannot see anything without first knowing the big picture. The big
picture is the frame of reference.

It is not necessary in communicating with 
> you that I stop and move out to the container level and say "Hartmut is in 
> Europe; in Germany; in whatever city". I treat your email address (which 
> has the "container" after your username) and ignore all the irrelevant 
> "containers".

You usually don't look at email addresses but just copy them from
somewhere. If you did look at them, and you had to construct a forwarding
route, you would probably proceed in the uucp style:

!de!a2e!phm
!org!lojban!lojbab

> The closest I see in anything I have ever written is that Lojban is
> designed to remove restrictions on human thought. But I don't see how
> anything about this topic is a restriction on thought; the convention
> has to go one way or the other, and barring the relevance/elision
> criterion, I don't see many reasons to choose one over the other.

Even if the convention goes "detri mastirseptembr pamo panonono" or
something even more inconvenient for human thinking, this would not create
any restriction that I can easily think of. But it would be
inconsistent with the approach of unidirectional (leftward) expansion 
that was taken in other parts of the language (like tanru). Also it would
put a useless strain on memory and reception, as explained in the above
postman example. 

> >Apparently these considerations could create a conflict with the design
> >freeze. They show an inconsistency in the design of "detri". The removal
> >of which will probably have to wait until some official version upgrade of
> >the "Lojban Standard". Or is this not the way how Lojban is supposed to
> >evolve?
> 
> Lojban is intended to NOT evolve during the baseline period, other than the 
> grow in vocabulary. We will not even discuss possible changes to the 
> baseline while the baseline is in effect, which will be at least 5 years 
> from whenever.

This is what I meant. My question is whether Lojban will evolve by
"upgrades" in the way standards evolve, or rather by an anarchical process
as in "natural" languages. The fact that there is a design freeze seems
to suggest the former.

-phm