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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 06:38:17 -0400

At 09:30 PM 05/10/2000 +0000, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> > 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.

Given that language evolved the other way more often, and language is often 
(though not always) a medium of thought, I see no basis for the claim that 
human thinking is confined to one direction, and every reason to believe it 
can go both ways because that is how the languages used to express thought 
evolved. Given that we are less than understanding of human cognition, 
this claim is even more astounding.

To claim that any human language does not reflect the way humans think 
seems nonsense to me.

> > 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 the speaker and recipient share common context, no weeding out is 
needed. If you say "Nora" in this newsgroup, it is likely that most who 
read it will understand you as referring to Nora LeChevalier, my wife and 
Lojbanist, even though she is seldom present in the discussion. It is thus 
convenient not to have to spell out my last name all the time. If on the 
other hand, you reverse the order and say "LeChevalier" in any context 
where it is not obvious that you are referring to lojbab, that long word 
provides relatively little information and it has to be completed and then 
you get to hear the "Nora" or the "Bob" that actually identifies the 
information.

Maybe because your surname is shorter than your given name, this seems less 
obvious to you.

Language users tend to abbreviate to the shortest form that gets the 
information across. They then add information if the information is not 
seeming to communicate. By the nature of time sequence, that clarifying 
information has to be added after the initial information. This tendency 
would probably have evolved more in face to face communication where 
communication failure is made evident by body language - I say Nora, and if 
you look confused, I add "LeChevalier" or "my wife". The clarifying 
information has to come afterwards since I cannot unsay "Nora" to prepend 
LeChevalier.

>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.

But if I do not know which is critical, I will choose one, and then add the 
other if needed for clarity. In the case of names, it is very much 
cultural as to which name is given first in case of uncertainty as to how 
much information is needed - familiarity tends to to favor the given name, 
formality the surname. In the case of dates, if we are uncertain how much 
information is needed, we would be prone to use the shortest information 
first, which is the day number (assuming that the month is expressed by 
name rather than number, since using numerical abbreviations for months are 
a relatively recent development)

>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?

That is thinking like a computer again. Human beings don't sort name 
lists. They communicate information, usually in the shortest form possible 
consistent with clarity.

>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?

Depends. Ultimately the house number, but if they don't get it to the zip 
code first, the house number won't do much good. Yet the US Post Office 
wants the zip code at the end, and not the beginning even though they sort 
first by zip code.

> > 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

You are presuming that everyone transposes in the direction that you 
do. We don't.

> > >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 most relevant information is the most restrictive information, because 
the "outermost container" may be totally irrelevant because obvious. Just 
as within your household, using "Pilch Hartmut" would be a waste, so you 
use Hartmut. But if a visitor with the given name Hartmut is in your home, 
do people say Pilch Hartmut?

>The western centrifugal addressing is of course based on language habits,

and language habits came at one point from thought 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.

I simply do not see how there is any speaker or listener distinction that 
is relevant. In my preceding example, if there are two Bob's in my house 
(quite often), I do not expect or want to hear "LeChevalier" unless I 
cannot tell from context which Bob is being referred to. Not that I 
dislike my name, but it is a lot of sound to process if it conveys unneeded 
information.

> > >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.

I find it interesting that you think you know the details of your own 
cognitive processes so well. Have you thought of publishing a paper?

Myself, if I hear an address, I want it in the form that the US Post Office 
will want me to write it on the letter. I don't break it down, and the US 
Post Office generally requires a complete address with no ellipsis. If you 
leave off information, it is the Country and zip code which can be left 
off, and still have the letter delivered, and they are what comes at the 
end in the US manner of addressing (indeed, I know only of Russia as a 
place where the city and zip code are expected first on a letter address).

> > >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.

Sorry, but I seldom consciously consider the big picture. And if the big 
picture information is not important to resolution, I don't want to waste 
time consciously thinking about it.

> 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

Not in the least. Almost no one who uses email these days has any thought 
of uucp. I see [email-masked], and the order is the opposite from that of 
uucp. If talking to someone else within a2e.de, presumably you would just 
have to say "phm" to get to you, and that is the ultimately essential 
information in picking you out. What I need to get to that ultimate point 
is context-dependent, and context dependent really does mean that you 
cannot tell me that I need the "container" because you do not know.

> > 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).

ONE part of the language has leftward expansion. All the rest is rightward.

> > 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.

It is our intent to maintain the baseline until there is a large enough 
speaker base that ONLY natural language evolutionary processes will be 
possible. When the baseline ends, it ends permanently and anarchy will 
prevail. I don't expect that there will be a Lojban Academy. If there is, 
it will probably be because some kind of standards board is needed for some 
application of the language in commerce (i.e. like ISO), and the standard 
will not apply to the human language except insofar as people choose to let 
it apply.

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!)