Subject: Re: [lojban] Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:21:44 -0400

At 06:39 PM 06/13/2001 -0400, Rob Speer wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 04:58:27PM -0400, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> > I am pretty sure that .ui ko'a klama is NOT mi gleki lenu ko'a klama. It
> > is closer to mi pe sekai leka mi gleki cu cinmo zo'e lenu ko'a klama. I
> > feel some emotion about ko'as going, and I am characterized by some aspect
> > of being happy as part of that feeling, but I resist even that much
> > commitment to a bridi claim about my emotions.
>
>So I've been shot down by Lojbab. In an official rant, no less. Sucks to 
>be me.

The "official rant was most definitely NOT directed at you or really any 
other individual. It was the general tone of the discussion amongst 
several people that seemed to be rather lightly deciding to throw away the 
book but merely disagreeing on what to throw away.

>However, it seems that I still need to be more clear about the point I'm 
>trying
>to make. Certainly it is bad to assume that {.ui ko'a klama} means the same as
>{mi gleki lenu ko'a klama}. But it is worse to say it means "I would be happy
>if ko'a klama", because the added conditional part comes from expressing it in
>English.

That is the limitation of English. The English captures ONE aspect of the 
Lojban - that ko'a klama may not be an actuality - but confuses another 
because of the apparent conditional.

>My list of bridi corresponding to attitudinals was not meant to change
>anything. It was meant to make a point.

That was not clear.

>I was fairly convinced that with Robin's proposal (and without his needless
>pessimism about it) we were getting fairly close to an understanding of
>attitudinals which neither contradicts the Book nor actual usage of Lojban.
>I realize that my original proposal (which started off this part of the 
>thread)
>was flawed and _did_ contradict the Book, but I'm not talkang about that one
>anymore.

I'm having trouble keeping the proposals straight, in part since (per the 
rant) I have a strong mindset against anything with the English word 
"proposal" in it.

>The book's third example in the chapter about attitudinals is: {.a'o la djan.
>klama}, which it translates as [Hopefully] John is coming. This is different
>from the other ones where it says [Wow!] John is coming, or [Whee!] John is
>coming.

How different? The primary difference that I see is that it doesn't use am 
interjection word with an exclamation point. But that is because in 
English we have no interjection of hope. We (probably me, taken over by 
Cowan) used "hopefully" as the closest thing we could think of to such an 
interjection. Indeed the word sometimes IS used alone as an interjection, 
but usually with a questioning intonation as if "surely you will confirm to 
me that John is coming", but the Lojban doesn't require the question. I 
think I also have heard it used in response to someone else's assertion, in 
which case it indicates hope plus some amount of skepticism, and again the 
Lojban doesn't necessarily include that skepticism.

Any other difference other than the limits of English translation is 
probably due to the pragmatics of the emotion "hope" which tends not to 
manifest about things that we know to be true.

> My list of bridi that corresponded to attitudinals was an attempt to
>explain why it has a different effect - because if you express it in Lojban,
>the effect isn't different after all.

Which, if I understand you, is probably the way it should be.

>The book explains this in English by dividing the attitudinals into 
>categories.
>This is one part that other people were trying to needlessly "fix" with their
>proposals - however, these categories simply exist to make the concepts easier
>to understand in English.

Precisely. The categories are not "real" but explanatory.

>Let me repeat Robin's proposal which I liked, for the sake of discussion:
>
> > 1. In a sentence by itself, UI is a bare emotion.
> > 2. At the front of a sentence, UI modifies the assertive nature of the
> > whole bridi.
> > 3. After a particular sumti, UI modifies the assertive nature of the
> > element, but leaves the assertive nature of the bridi alone.
> > 4. After the brivla, UI does not modify the assertive nature at all.
>
>So, if you take my interpretation of Robin's proposal, part 2, and 
>rephrase it,
>you get:
>
>2. Leave the attitudinals at the beginning of the sentence exactly as the Book
> describes them.
>
>Good enough?

I can't intelligently comment. It doesn't match how I see it, but I don't 
think that I understand what is the same or what is different from how I 
see it, because I don't really grasp the phrase "the assertive nature of 
the sentence". It just seems wrong.

>The part I wished to focus on was what the attitudinals do in other places.
>
>The Book doesn't explicitly mention attitudinals in their own sentence, but
>there seems to be a general consensus that they must express a pure emotion.
>So 1 is okay.

I covered that in my comments. It has a pragmatic effect which is tied to 
either the sentences preceding or the sentences following. We have fu'e 
and fu'o to disambiguate if pragmatics does not make it clear which.

>The examples in the Book seem to show that attitudinals placed later in the
>sentence do not change the assertive nature of the sentence.

I don't see how they are any different than at the beginning of the 
sentence, except that they put emotional focus on one word or construct 
which helps in the pragmatic interpretation of the emotional response.

> Robin's #3 extends
>the meaning of this to make it worth putting the attitudinal there anyway. The
>examples in the Book in section 8 seem to support this.
>
>The Book appears to say nothing about what an attitudinal does after the
>brivla.

That is because it is ambiguous - indeed your statement is ambiguous as 
well because a selbri is not limited to just one "brivla" so that we don't 
know what "the" brivla someone is referring to is.

The short answer is that the attitudinal expresses an emotion tied to the 
shortest scope construct with which the prior word is associated. For a 
selbri, this will usually be the final brivla of the selbri, and to get 
scope over the entire selbri (if more than one brivla) one needs 
forethought ke/ke'e - in the case of emotional expression, I think that if 
one would think to put ke/ke'e in ONLY for the attitudinal expression, one 
would probably put the attitudinal after the ke.

So in a single brivla selbri, it is an emotional reaction either to the 
single brivla OR to the fact that that single brivla is the selbri that 
expresses the bridi relationship, or perhaps something else. The book 
doesn't purport to explain all possible Lojban constructions, only those 
for which a definite meaning and usage have been prescribed.

You are proposing an interpretation for a usage that was never analyzed, 
that at first glance does not seem to reflect my understanding of the 
pattern of attitudinal usage. It appears to be trying to set a convention 
of interpretation of an emotional usage without considering a wide range of 
circumstances as to how that usage might come about. Indeed I don't think 
we are capable of considering such a wide range while remaining in English, 
at least with non-fluent Lojbanists, most of whom haven't used that many 
attitudinals in ANY usage. (I suspect that xod in his writings and me in 
my more rare speech and writing have been the main users of attitudinals).

>Robin's #4 deals with that in the safest way - it remains an emotion
>which is in some way attached to the brivla and does not modify the assertive
>nature of the sentence.
>
>So, now we have a proposal which contradicts neither the Book nor usage in
>Lojban, and which allows for both attitudinals which modify an assertion and
>attitudinals which don't. What more could we need?

Experience.

Other than that, I honestly don't know. But I don't know whether we need 
any proposal at all since I haven't had a problem made clear to me.

lojbab
--
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