From richardt@flash.net Sat Jun 09 18:24:20 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: richardt@flash.net X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 10 Jun 2001 01:24:19 -0000 Received: (qmail 95738 invoked from network); 10 Jun 2001 01:24:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 10 Jun 2001 01:24:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO pimout2-int.prodigy.net) (207.115.63.101) by mta1 with SMTP; 10 Jun 2001 01:24:19 -0000 Received: from flash.net ([216.51.103.126]) by pimout2-int.prodigy.net (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id f5A1OHk92450 for ; Sat, 9 Jun 2001 21:24:17 -0400 Sender: richardt@pimout2-int.prodigy.net Message-ID: <3B22BB9F.77FB73E9@flash.net> Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 19:13:19 -0500 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22smp i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] An approach to attitudinals References: <20010609150406.A506@twcny.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Richard Todd 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 <> ...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