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

From: PILCH Hartmut <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 22:08:47 +0000 (/etc/localtime)

> >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.

Speech is bound to time and time is uni-directional. Or are you capable
of time travel?

> 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. 

which you don't have to do anyway, no matter whether your expansion goes
leftward or rightward.

> 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.

With family names we have a somewhat special case.
People were some centuries ago usually searched for via their family.
And that is still the case when you send a letter to Nora.
The postman will first be interested in LeChevalier, not in "Nora".

But in a more individualistic society, people are no longer predominantly
referenced by family. That is why the American habit of using "Nora" even
in such a non-intimate circle as this forum is very modern, and may seem
strange to Asians and Europeans, who may feel that Americans are
aggressively tearing down distance and pretending to be on intimate terms
with people, with whom polite distance, i.e. relating to one another in
terms of a stratified address system with different layers of closeness,
as in traditional society, would be more honest and appropriate.

But, as I said, the American pattern is quite well suited to modern
reality and especially to Internet reality. The "lojbab" pattern of
artificial naming is even more suited to the latter.

We have here a concurrence of several patterns (individualistic vs
stratified), while with dates and places there is only one pattern: a
stratified one.

> Language users tend to abbreviate to the shortest form that gets the 
> information across. 

Again, your thinking proceed from the user than from the recipient. For
the debat about whether a certain language design is appropriate to the
requirements of human thinking, the latter is far more important. And
both contradict each other. Human communication devolops in a field of
tension between speaker interest and listener interest. 

> 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.

It has to come afterward from the speakers perspective. Why? Precisely
because speach is confined in time and time is unidirectional. 

But leftward expansion is perfectly possible. From the listener's
perspective it is easier if the expansion comes first.

> >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.

You are still clinging to the time-confined speaker's perspective.

> 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.

I gave an explanation for that above. But neither your explanation nor
mine has anything to do with how different language conventions
(Roman-based vs Chinese-based) handle name expansion.

> 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 

for the listener, starting from the outer containers provides more
freedom. He can stop listening as soon as he finds that the achieved
level of detail is enough. E.g. if I say, using a date translative
"dato":

XX was born dato year 1976 month 08 day 15

then the listener can decide that "197x" is all he wants to know and stop
listening to the rest.

If I say

XX was born dato day 15 month 08 year 1976

he must collect uninteresting details until he arrives at the end, and he
even has to switch back and forth between big endian (numbers like 1976,
which use big endian for very good reason -- you wouldn't argue to
reintroduce the Roman numbering system, would you?)

> >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.

They also sort them. Try remembering a given set of history dates.
Also, you seem to be confusing computers and man-computer interfaces.
The latter use human language conventions.

> >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.

The US Post Office follows an entrenched language convention without ever
questioning it.

> > > 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.

Who is "we" ?
If the US Post Office didn't transpose, it wouldn't be able to deliver a
single letter. And also, if you don't transpose dates you can't compare
them and your memory for them will be like a sieve. 

When asked: When did WW II end, how do you proceed in thinking?

Do you first say:

On the 8th

?
Or 

In 1945
?

> > > 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. 

As I already said repeatedly, if it is obvious, it will either not be
there at all (in case of good speaker-listener consensus) or the listener
will treat it like a recapitulation of something he already knows and wait
comfortably (without riddle-guessing and memorising strain as in the case
of "8th" above) until the real (i.e. listener-side) critical level (e.g.
197x as in the above example) is reached.

> 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?

In Bavaria some people do. And the Postman is first interested in the
familiy name. Hartmut isn't even on the door bell.

> >The western centrifugal addressing is of course based on language habits,
> 
> and language habits came at one point from thought habits.

at what point?
when the cave man started arriving at the 2nd level of articulation?

> >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.

see the door bell example and my explanations about two concurrent
addressing systems in the case of personal names (stratified versus
individualistic, the Internet forming one extreme end with names like
"lojbab").

> >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?

Yes. At least of putting an article on address structures on the Net.
I do in fact like to program my own thinking, and there are a
lot of psychology books out there that tell people to do just that. I
never had time to read them, but I felt I was doing it all along anyway.

> 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).

If something can be elided, that shows that it is beyond the outermost
circle. The most critical part is the outermost circle itself. It is the
place where the postman must go next. After he has gone there, maybe
he can quit and another postman will take over.

> > > >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. 

That is because normal email addresses are more humanized than uucp
addresses. The uucp form is a very good man-machine interface convention,
and the UK for a long time insisted on writing email addresses like

[email-masked]

The reason this was changed is simply that some other countries' thinking
habits prevailed. But internally addresses are still transposed. All IP
addresses have a big-endian (centripetal) structure, and UUCP is also
still in wide use.

> 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.

For the listener / forwarder, the toplevel domain is essential for getting
started. Whether one wants to continue and up to which stage one wants to
go on (a2e? phm?), is a secondary question. If you want to go on up to
phm, then you also must first go to de. If that doesn't interest you,
then probably for you the address "[email-masked]" is only an unstructured
textstring that you pass to you mailer. As it is for most people,
including me, when I don't happen to be configuring sendmail or uucp.

> >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.

This one part is the part that is at the origin of date structure
conventions in all languages that I know of.

> 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. 

I have difficulty with the very concept of "natural" here. Language is
convention, and conventions are made by humans and subject to ethical
judgements. The talk about "naturalness" is essentially itself an ethical
statement. It translates into: "I refuse responsibility for the
conventions I choose. I decide to go with the tide and I don't allow
anybody to reproach me for that."

You could just as well claim that monarchy is natural. And people have
always claimed it, until democracy (social contract based politics) became
a reality. Confucian scholars said "Just as there is only one sun on 
heaven, there can only be one Emperor on the earth". And they devised a
whole system of "natural law" (tian1li3), which modern philosophers
renounce as a typical "naturalistic fallacy".

The talk about "natural language development" is also a naturalistic
fallacy.

> 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.

Sounds very noble, but the endeavor for human designed logical language
will go on.

This is the kind of subject matter, on which I am writing articles on the
Net. Currently some, in German, are to be found on wortbasar.ffii.org, a
project for community effort based terminology building in "natural"
languages.

-phm