Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:not only

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 18:55:30 -0400

At 05:11 PM 04/19/2001 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>>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.

This is not quite why we changed it, though these arguments entered into 
it. One reason was a realization from prototype theory that word meanings 
(especially of colors) simply are NOT comparative to a typical in nature, 
but rather reflect closeness to an archtypical or prototypical concept of 
blue. Thus "blue" is "less non-blue than any non-blue object, or something 
to that effect, though even this formulation may break down at the borders 
between colors.

Nora also had strong distaste for what is now "na se blanu", the negated 
converse, which IIRC JCB attached special meaning to.

lojbab

> 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.
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--
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