Subject: Re: [lojban] An approach to attitudinals

From: Richard Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 19:13:19 -0500

Rob Speer wrote:
> .i .a'o le merja'a cu stace
> {hope} The American-leader is honest.
> The President is honest, and this gives me hope.

I think this form ('I have hope') just looks similar to 'I hope that' in english. They'e saying something different, and so my vote is that they should not look the same in lojban. 

In this case, the president's honesty is your justification for feeling hope that some unspecified other thing (one would guess "a happy future") is true, right? So you could just say that...

le merja'a cu stace .iseki'ubo.a'o <<broda>>

...which seems to express the 'gives me hope' more exactly. Comments?

I think 'gives me hope' also could just be...
le merja'a cu stace .iseki'ubo mi kufra

At any rate, this conversation has dispelled some of the illusions I had about lojban and ambiguity. I hope that the eventual solution doesn't leave the meaning of the sentence too much to
interpretation.

We have two (or is it more?) senses in which an attitudinal may or may not interact with the truth value of a sentence. Why not (except for the language baseline...) make them distinct? I'm thinking
that the default should be non-interaction (.a'o I hope for the truth of this sentence, and I claim it is true), and that one or more suffix cmavo could indicate that you are indeed using the
propositional sense (.a'o{sfx} I hope that this sentence is true, but it may not be) of the attitudinal. 

Obviosly for things like hope and intent, the default use will be less common than the propositional one, and usually even silly.

What do you think? This gives us the ability to say exactly what we mean. Lojban has cmavo-laden shades of everything else, and it's very precise that way. There must be a few combinations of three
letters left... :)

Richard