Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:not only

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 17:11:40 EDT

In a message dated 4/19/2001 3:05:12 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Which few clever things were lost?
> 
The best was the one that took all primary adjectives as fundamentally 
comparatives. Thus, for example, {blanu} (one of the rare words that survived 
in shape) meant "x1 is bluer than x2." That made it easier to explain why a 
blue house (bluer than a typical house) was so much less blue than a blue 
bluebell (bluer than a typical bluebell). It also led to endless arguments 
to the effect that, if we left the second place out, it was filled by a bound 
variable and thus everything was blue, since bluer than something. The 
response was -- within Loglan -- to say that that was not how to fill that 
space but rather with the contextually appropriate form, but that turned out 
to be too difficult for Loglanists to figure out. So, when we got to Lojban, 
that whole pattern (which was based on very good research, by the way, into 
what happens in ordinary languages) was dropped. There was some talk about 
replacing the comparison with a "to observer" or "by standard" which could 
then be filled in appropriately in much the same way as the comparisons would 
("in comparison to a typical house" would make a good standard), but that was 
too hard, too -- and I suppose soemone could claim that there is *some* 
standard by which a screaming red house is blue. So, we got just the flat 
positive forms.
There weren't a lot of others and I can't remember any good ones just now. 
If they come to me, I'll drop them into the pipe.