Subject: Re: [lojban] As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers]

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 15:26:07 -0400

At 10:13 AM 06/26/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>So, after all the rhetoric against JCB for taking all predications without
>specific markers as merely potential, we end up in essentially the same
>place.

I don't remember a lot of rhetoric on that subject, but no, I don't think 
we ended at the same place. We ended at potentially the same place %^)

Seriously, a predication without specific marker is elliptical-tense. That 
is not "merely potential" - it means that the tense is what context 
demands. In the absence of context, a potential tense is a possible 
interpretation, and some specific contexts may demand a potential tense as 
interpretation. Isn't this what we were trying for in saying that 
Loglan/Lojban was a tense-optional language?

> I assume that our rhetoric for it is somewhat different (an
>unspecified tense -- nevermind that tense is not an obligatory category in lb
>-- may be located anywhere in the spatio-temporal-possible-imaginal world?).

OK, I think.

>Well, at least this allows me to call a bottle a bottle even if it never does
>in fact have anything in it, because it is the sort of thing that in many
>worlds better run than this one would have something in it. What I can
>presumably not say of my empty bottle is {ta ca botpi}.

No. Because as has been noted, your "empty" bottle has air or something in 
it, so it is not the case, absent the use of a vacuum pump, that it is 
actually without contents of any kind.

You cannot say "ta ca'a botpi zu'i"

It is therefore a little unclear what to do with a vacuum pump emptied 
bottle, except maybe to use kunti as the main selbri and le botpi which 
allows the not-quite veridical bottle because empty of amy contents.

>This seems a little
>odd, since when I say {ta botpi} I am probably NOT thinking of them worlds
>over there and then but of the bottle I have in my hand here and now, that is
>the untensed form is contextually focused to the present. (This was at the
>heart of the rhetoric against JCB, as I recall, as well.)

We beat a lot of the JCB rap by changing zo'e into a true ellipsis - if 
there is context that can supply a value of zo'e that makes the statement 
true, then predication works.

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