Subject: Re: [lojban] ce'u

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 02:23:14 -0400

At 02:20 PM 8/17/01 -0700, Nick NICHOLAS wrote:

>There has been a fairly icky exchange on ce'u in
>http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?ce%27u . I am disinclined to say
>anything about this anymore, but this does have to be cleared up for the
>lessons, and the final lesson discusses ce'u. So here goes.
>
>I will try and (a) break this up into digestible issues; (b) not be
>partisan.
>
>1. Implicit in much of the misunderstandings on that discussion is the
>following issue: is it meaningful to speak of an abstraction containing
>ce'u, outside a bridi? That is, can ce'u be filled with a value that does
>not come from the jufra containing it?

Lojbab's short answer is that there is no definitive answer yet, and any 
discussion of th issue in the lessons should indicate this. There has been 
insufficient usage exploration of the options, and multiple approaches are 
being used with varying degrees of success.

I personally think that ANY issue that is similarly somewhat up in the air 
should be presented as if there are multiple options which can be tried, OR 
if that is not feasible, that the student be warned that there is no 
standard answer and that s/he can expect to see usages that do not agree 
with whatever particular method(s) you present in the book.

In this sense, And is correct that the language isn't "done" (and it may 
never be), and presenting an issue that is not decided as if it were as set 
in concrete as the issues that really are solid is potentially damaging. I 
liked the fact the Cowan in the refgrammar occasionally made it clear that 
some issues were not firmly decided. The use of ce'u is one of these, and 
I don't think that any number of hours of discussion on the list or the 
Wiki will change this, because many of us with an opinion just don't have 
the time to participate.

>If it can, then one can say things like {leka *mi* gleki cu xamgu do}
>(where {mi} fills the {ce'u} slot --- I'm avoiding {ce'u} for now.)
>
>If it cannot, then a sentence like this is meaningless: you should be
>saying {lenu mi gleki cu xamgu do},

Since I distinguish between the meaning of nu gleki and ka gleki in and of 
themselves, such that one may be xamgu and the other not, I do not accept 
the "should". I also don't agree that ce'u is always necessary to a ka 
abstraction in the way that I understand it, remembering that my archetype 
of ka is NOT as a place in a bridi with ce'u inserted but rather more 
towards an elliptical ka gleki being the generalized abstract Happiness.

But I don't have time now to give this issue more time than this. And I 
can't even be sure that I am following your summary, given that it is 
230AM. But since I think most of these issues need time and experience 
more than anything else, this doesn't much bother me (the fact that you 
could cite a half dozen different opinions on how things should go is a 
GOOD thing - a year ago, the issue would have raised only a couple 
different opinions. When 20 or 50 people can state independent opinions it 
will be better still).

Now for the editorial. Actually, I'll be mercifully brief: I now think
>there is something wrong about {le ka mi xendo cu xamgu do}. I'm almost
>prepared to concede that {ka} should not be a free agent, like {nu} and
>{du'u}, but restricted to bridi contexts which can plausibly supply the
>means of filling in the value of {ce'u}.

I disagree. I take the above as saying something along the lines of 
"Kindness is good (to you) when I am the one being kind. The other places 
of xendo are not specified, and perhaps cannot be - this is a true 
abstraction in which the values of the unfilled places are truly elliptical.

> However, I also think the
>mechanism of filling in the value of {ce'u} should be local to the
>{ka}-clause, for clarity if nothing else. And I think that making {ka} and
>{li'i} behave uniformly, so that both take {ce'u} and both take x2, would
>be a very good thing.
>
>The primary baseline concern, as I understand it, is not to invalidate
>existing text.

The primary baseline concern is to not make changes. Period. To not even 
CONSIDER making changes. If something turns out to be so broken that we 
have to make a change, then the baseline has failed (and we would be hard 
pressed to stop the flow once the dam against prescriptive change were to 
break).

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