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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 00:47:39 -0400

At 01:21 PM 06/26/2000 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>[email-masked] wrote:
>
> > So, after all the rhetoric against JCB for taking all predications without
> > specific markers as merely potential,
>
>He wanted to equate absence of markers with potential. We treat 
>potential/actual
>as one more set of optional markers, which can be defaulted appropriately just
>like all the other markers.

... and

> > 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 is very predicate specific. When you say that something is a beverage,
>you do not necessarily/typically mean that it is being drunk at this very
>moment; you are quite happy with a potential interpretion. IOW, the
>dispositional predicates like "soluble in water", "beverage", "heir" are not
>treated as a special semantic class in Lojban.
>
>Unexpressed tenses, like unexpressed arguments, are truly context-sensitive:
>they are Humptydumptyisms that mean whatever we need them to mean at the
>moment of utterance.

are I think basically what I was trying to say in my post, bu5t probably 
said more clearly.

> > 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.
>
>Just so.

Nora and I were talking this evening about the problems of empty bottles 
when she made two points which reminded me of one old point.

Her point:
A bottle sitting in a pond and therefore filled with water is somewhat less 
a "bottle", i.e. a closed/closable container used to set material off from 
its surroundings, than a bottle of wine is sitting on the shelf. Likewise, 
and empty bottle in air is the same as a water-filled bottle in water - it 
is not actually serving as a container.

Now Nora contends that Lojban predicates can be used as nouns, verbs, 
adjectives, etc. and have a sense appropriate to each role. She tends to 
think more in terms of the verb sense when trying to understand a selbri 
(especially one with 2 or more places) because other languages just don't 
translate any other sense very well.

So when we say "ta botpi" we are saying "That bottles" ("that bottlingly 
contains", and English not having an intransitive verb "bottles", we start 
to see the problem with having no specified or specifiable x2, or with 
having an empty bottle - it is not a container if it does not actually 
contain anything - it is merely a potential container (but then isn't most 
anything vaguely concave a potential container?)

At about this point, I then suddenly recalled PRECISELY how Athelstan and I 
addressed this issue when we first concocted the place structures for the 
container gismu and several other gismu that have somewhat similar 
problems. A bottle than contains nothing is in fact NOT a bottle, but 
merely something that looks like a bottle, i.e. that has the form of a 
bottle, but which is not in fact serving its containment function.

You can thus use the "potential bottle" rationale as discussed earlier with 
some kind of in-mind potential contents (which need not be stated); Nora 
then suggested that you could make this explicit and avoid the 
quantification issue by saying that it contains a lack-of-da/ko'a (not 
clear whether this would be "lo claxu be da/ko'a" or "lonu claxu da/ko'a" - 
a container doesn't really contain a state, it seems to me) where I am 
using ko'a to refer to some specific kind of contents.

Alternatively, the original idea Athelstan and I had was that you would use 
a lujvo (or tanru) for "bottle-form" (botpi tarmi) where this might now 
need to be massaged some due to the more formal analysis of place 
structures that has taken over since A. and I did our initial 
work. Several other situations that have come up where people have 
proposed the use of zi'o to eliminate a place that would otherwise seem to 
be filled with "noda" were probably covered by A and me using -tarmi 
lujvo. As a result of our work, tarmi ended up with a high priority for 
its good rafsi assignments, though I suspect that it has not been used in 
many lujvo since then.

Nora then suggested that for botpi, in addition to tarmi, you have the 
possible use of -tool (tutci) in making a potential-indicating 
lujvo. Remembering that a Lojban tool is one where form determines 
function, an empty bottle is indeed a bottle-tool, a form of a bottle 
waiting to be used for its function as a container tool.

Somewhere in the course of this, Nora and I also discussed how to say 
"vacuum", which I think is where the claxu idea was triggered. I also 
looked at the place structure of kunti, and it seems clear that you can 
have a lot of fun with "le botpi be X cu kunti Y", but it would not make a 
lot of sense for "le botpi be X cu kunti X".

Hopefully all this will feed further thought. This is one case where 
original intent may have been overtaken by the elaborating development of 
the language, or it may be that it will provide a broad escape hatch for 
some tricky problems as was originally intended.

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