Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Meaningless talk

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 15:11:58 EST

In a message dated 3/2/2001 1:33:23 AM Central Standard Time, [email-masked] 
writes:

> Okay. What about _See Spot run_? It is one of the most opaque
> constructions of Modern English; translating it into another lg
> is no trivial matter. Try a few natlangs that you are familiar
> with, and you'll see what I mean.
> 

Good point, although I think the problem is more with the unclarity of the 
phrase than with its complexity. Are we to observe Spot, who is running, or 
the running of Spot or something about Spot's running (a quality or its 
quantity)? Each of these is relatively straightforward (Turkish counts to 
the contrary notwithstanding -- is this an unfamiliar construction in 
Turkish) but trying to cover all of them at once is a problem in some 
languages -- and certainly in Lojban. Happily, we get them all done by one 
good look.

"See Spot run" was hyperbole, of course. Actually Lojban makes it relatively 
easy -- vocab aside -- to get through the First Reader and even the Second. 
This often instills a sense of achievement in the learner that leads them to 
leap to the College Freshman level. We used to hate first letters from 
people, since they usually contained a translation of some untranslatable 
piece, like the Bible or the Way-Power Classic or Alice, the former two from 
unidentified English translations. Not that I can talk: my third lesson with 
JCB in '77 was about "things in the room" and went immediately to sense-data 
and subatomic particles (or tried to) and my first writing was the Babel 
story. 

So, yes, we should try things just beyond our reach. But we should check 
them before we send them off. We can maybe allow careless error and the "but 
you can figure it out" excuse in spoken contexts or interactive writing on 
#lojban, but they don't go in written work, especially since both checkers 
seem to work OK (the MSDOS jbofihe doesn't like quotes that are not complete 
structures, but that is minor). Remember, the game here is not to convey 
information, something we can all still do better in English, but to convey 
information *in Lojban*. The excuse, "they can figure it out" thus doesn't 
hold if the figuring involves ungrammatical lojban or grammatical lojban that 
says something other than what you want to say -- or mislexed Lojban for that 
matter. 

As far as I can figure, one of the topic of discussion was whether langauage 
is langue or parole, the system of rules and items or the actual occasions of 
use. The usual answer is that it is parole primarily and langue is just a 
theory about that. But Lojban is different -- the langue is set and the 
parole is way too small to justify the lange, and, indeed, often goes 
contrary to it. But we reject the mistaken parole rather than correctin the 
langue to justify them. And, as long as lack of syntactic ambiguity is a 
goal, we will continue to do so. So, we can say that the aim of the game is 
to express what you mean in grammatical Lojban.

The room for innovation in Lojban is not in creating new structures against 
the rules but in using structures in the rules to break mindsets. I think we 
are doing a bit of that now, though so far much of it has been cases of the 
surprise of the first use of a structure that the rules set up and in its 
intended sense, rather than a new use for an old structure, or a surprising 
new structure that the rules allow but had not already accounted for.

But, a few examples from the problems with the thread, skipping those already 
noted ({ko} for {do}, say) for the most part. Most of these are from xod 
(unless marked otherwise), but I take that to be an accidental feature of 
this exchange, not a generalizable characteristic. 

xorxes:
<i ie cumki fa le nu pilno loinalsatci valsi le nu cusku
lo smucau i ji'a cumki le nu pilno vy le nu cusku lo smucfu
i ji'a cumki le nu pilno loi satcytce valsi le nu cusku
lo smucau i frili>
I supose the later {le nu ...} might be conditions under which something 
(unexpressed and not very clearly implied) is possible, but I put {fa} in 
front of all of them, as fitting the context better. In an exact discourse, 
this could obviously be a disaster, in effect reversing some claim.

<oi le se lifri cu mleca lo'e jinvi le ni le remei sarcu cu zgana>
"Oy, the expriences are less than the typical opiner in the amount the paired 
necessity observes" Oy, indeed. Just opaque and I can't see what to do with 
it. xorxes says he understands but does not expatiate, alas.

<i ro bu'a cu'u da zo'u di cipra le ka fatci lebu'a>
xorxes does a job on this but skip the point (irrelevant by the time he is 
done) that the intended meaning of {cu'u da} requires probably {poi se cusku 
da} or at least {pe cu'u da}, {cu'u} identifies the speaker but does not 
claim that he is a speaker (cf. its use to avoid quote/unquote in extended 
discourse reports). 

<ma'a xusra be le du'u
de ka'enai smuni be'o jo cumki fa le du'u de ka'e smuni fi ko'e>
Does this say that we make a certain assertion just in case a certain 
condition is possible? Then we don't need the {be - be'o} but the conjunction 
is sentential (as the different subjects also require. Or do we assert a 
certain equivalence, which, because the subjects are still different, is 
probably still going to require sentential connectives but some other more 
complex gear as well to embed that connective in the {du'u} clause. The 
first is grammatically more likely, the second contentually. But, whether 
{ka'enai} denies {ka'e} or {smuni}, the whole does not seem to work well 
under either interpretation.

<ta'enai cipra lo fancu no'u mu'a zo mlatu i ta'ecipra
lo nu fancu pilno no'u mu'a lu ta mlatu li'u >
"sporadically test the function and habitually test the sentence"? I think 
this is meant to be something like "give a non-traditional test to the 
function and a traditonal one to the sentence" {naltcaci cipra} and {tcaci 
cipra}, though I am not too clear what distinction is meant.

xorxes:
<lo cipnxirundi pamei >
cpixunri pamoi? and not too clear even then, nor is {xuncpi}, though that is 
at least a bird.

<ca'e le si'o smuni cu seldjuno fi le zasti>
I'm not sure you can do this by definitional fiat and expect anyone to 
follow, nor is it clear that a concept is djuno-known (as opposed to 
slabu-known, say). the crucial point -- which I am not sure this makes -- 
seems to be {pe'i le si'o smuni cu srana lo zasti}, not that I would agree 
even with that.

(I remember now why I do answers on Word rather than directly to the e-mail: 
aol tends to lose half-written e-mail when you go off to looks something up. 
This is the second run on this answer.)