Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: containers

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 10:57:20 +0300

"Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" wrote:
> At 04:14 PM 06/25/2000 -0700, Jorge Llambias wrote:
> >This is the point. If we take the place structures seriously,
> >ta is actually being a botpi only when it contains something,
> >a side effect of the inflated place structures.
> 
> No. What is being missed here, and may affect the RECORD statement
> as well, is that Loglan/Lojban considers potential tenses to be
> equivalent to actual tenses for purposes of defining predicates,
> in the absence of context. Thus a bottle "for" wine is one where
> the potential is deemed notable that the contents will be wine,
> even if there is no actual wine contents now.

Which is why Jorge said `is actually being a botpi' rather than just
`is a botpi'. As in {ta caca'a botpi .ijeku'i ta caca'a botpi noda}.
Haigha's potential for passing doesn't make him an actual passer to
anyone but the White King, if he has passed nobody on this occasion;
how then can something be an actual bottle whilst it isn't bottling
anything? Or does `vacuum' count as a default bottlee?

[email-masked] wrote:
> For now we are stuck with the reasonable appeal to common sense
> to sort the cases out -- not a good position for a logic, though
> a common one for langauges

Well, Lojban is a language first, and a logical one afterwards.
In those cases where we don't know how logic handles something,
the best it can do is handle it as languages do.

> (Robin the Turk had a note from someone who said logic was
> incompatible with language and it is cases like this that give
> the person's claim some force -- until they are taken care of.)

And it's the people who take care of them that are called linguists,
unlike the ones who make such claims, or believe them. In this case
Yu.D. Apresjan's work on lexical semantics comes to mind; he talks
about a difference between strong and weak semantic government --
obligatory vs optional participants in a relation or eventuality.
So a passee is under strong semantic government (there must be one
for passing to take place) while a bottlee is under weak semantic
government (something can actually be a bottle without bottling
anything). Problematic for some formalisms, perhaps, but not for
logic in general.

--Ivan