Subject: Re: [lojban] nilbroda

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 03:08:57 -0800

>At 03:02 PM 02/19/2001 -0800, Nick Nicholas wrote:
>> >From: Peter Moulder <[email-masked]>

>> >What about "variadic" selbri like "(nil)du"? How does one know whether
>> >the last sumti belongs to ni or du?

>>Ouch. Very good point. You either
>>(a) give up and don't admit nildu'o as a lujvo (which is no good);
>>(b) make nildu'o an exception, and have the ni2 precede the arguments of
>>du'o --- which leads to untold confusion;
>>(c) leave it as it stands, which is disastrous.

>>One would say at this point that usage and context would always sort this
>>out. To which I answer that if I want English, I know where to find it. If
>>a lujvo has an ambiguous place structure, it has no business being a lujvo.
>A lujvo never has an ambiguous place structure. There may be ambiguity in
>the conventions for choosing a place structure, but they are aonly
>conventions.

OK, Lojbab. What's the place structure of nildu'o? What is a ve nildu'o?

If ni2 follows the seltanru places (c), as the Book says occurs for every
other ni- lujvo, then a ve nildu'o is a standard of quantity, if you're
comparing two things, and a comparandum, if you're comparing three things:

xy. ni .abu dunli by. kei .y'ybu => xy. nildu'o .abu by. .y'ybu
xy. ni .abu dunli by. cy. kei .y'ybu => xy. nildu'o .abu by. cy. .y'ybu

This place structure is ambiguous. Therefore it cannot be accepted as the
place structure of a lujvo. Therefore the rule that ni2 follows the
seltanru cannot hold here. Therefore we can only prepose it (b):

xy. ni .abu dunli by. cy. kei .y'ybu => xy. nildu'o .y'ybu .abu by. cy.

But you see, making one exception to the rule that semantic salience
dictates lujvo ordering opens up the floodgates. If ni2 should move up
because the places of du are unpredictable, that isn't far from saying ni2
should move up in general because the places of any seltanru are
idiosyncratic.

As for a lujvo never having an ambiguous place structure, what happens when
you combine two gismu with variadic place structures? e.g. bunda 'pound',
which has as many degrees of subunit from x4 on as the local culture
allows, and dunli. What is the place structure of budydu'o? What is a xe
budydu'o? There's no way to combine the trailing places of bunda and the
trailing places of dunli so you know when the one starts and the other
ends. You'd better pray that you can drop one of those groups of places;
and since variadic places seem limited to units of measurement and dunli,
the seltanru seems safe to drop. But that's a messy contingency. Really, I
fail to see why we should have these variadics in the first place --- we
make do with ce-sets for just about everything else. Pity I didn't notice
this a decade ago...

>The reason this topic came up is that it
>appears that the convention you chose for nil- lujvo does not match what
>you actually did

As it turns out, the convention was not chosen by me, but by whoever had
written the abstraction paper before I'd written the lujvo paper.

>>I knew there was a reason I wanted those ni2 and traji4 in second position.
>>Oh well.
>If there is a reason, then state it, and we then know that under conditions
>applicable to that reason, there is an exception to the conventions.

Once more: predictability is good, and since each seltanru has its own
number of places, it would be nice to move recurring tertanru places which
would normally trail at the end of the predicate, where this is a regular
pattern. In reality, I wouldn't bother about ni2; the variadics do make it
impossible for ni2 to trail, but happily there aren't that many variadics
(If you asked me, there should be none...), and the ni2 place really is not
salient at all. I was bothered about traji, and did want the 4th place of
the superlative (a *very* salient place --- arguably just as salient as the
second) to become the 2nd for this reason: so the comparandum of any
superlative would always be the 2nd place. But this was not to be.

It's all moot with the language baselined, and it's not like I actually
care about nildu'o :-) , but an exception clearly has to be made for
abstraction lujvo involving variadics. And I do need to say my piece about
regular lujvo place structures: the notion that Lojbanists will memorise
idiosyncratic place structures for each of a zillion lujvo is utterly
doomed to failure. There will be regular principles for forming lujvo place
structures, or else they will have no place structures in practice: they
will be used for nothing but their x1s. And the more those principles are
followed, the easier the language is to handle.

Nick Nicholas, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. [email-masked]
www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis
"All the nations also under his dominion were filled with joy and
inexpressible gladness at not being even for a moment deprived of the
benefits of a well ordered government."
--- Eusebius of Caesaria on the accession of Constantine I.