From lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx Thu Apr 22 00:29:36 1999 X-Digest-Num: 120 Message-ID: <44114.120.683.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 03:29:36 -0400 From: Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 11:05:12 -0500 (CDT) >To: lojbab@lojban.org >From: John Clifford >Subject: da blanu de > >>>From my occasional drops-in on Lojban list (MyGAWD are they on the second >place of nitcu again/still?!)I see that things are stuck in the same cycling >rut. But I see one historical question arising anew (i.e., I haven't seen >it for several years) namely, why Loglan blanu was two-placed. So, because >i actually liked that feature and the related one, I offer a recap: >The background is a linguistic/philosophic discussion in the late 60's about >semantic primes. Two features of this slid into Loglan at the time: that >all predicates were inherently potential, becoming actualized only in >context (borrowed from Quine eventually, I think -- or at least blamed on >him) and that all "absolute" terms were actually relative. It was not clear >to what they were relative and trying to work this out was what led to >Lojban dropping this feature (that and the fact that you and John did not >like it) (The potential meaning was dropped even in Instiloglan in practice >at least because no one could figure out how to tell when the context had >actualized a term and when not.) But the cases underlying the original >comparative blanu remain to be dealt with, e.g, that a blue house is usually >much less blue than a blue sky or a blue sapphire but more so than a blue >baby and so on. The classics are things like tall dwarfs and short giants >(OK, small elephants and enormous ants). The skipped second place was >normally taken to be the typical of the named class of the first term: a >tall dwarf was (quite correctly) one taller than the typical dwarf, and so >on. But this came in conflict with the usual elision variable "something," >leaving everything blanu apparently (well, bluer than SOMEthing). >The new "by standard..." does not solve that problem, nor does appeal to >general paradigm cases. But people seem to get by just by using the rule >they use in English (or whatever), which is what the original insight was an >attempt to make explicit. >pc ---- lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ " Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.