Re: [engelang] Xorban compounding revisited

Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2012 21:28:14 -0400

Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban compounding revisited

To: engelang@yahoogroups.com

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 8:21 PM, John Cowan <cowan@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S. scripsit:
> Where we disagree is that I consider the tanru mechanism to be a sort
> of relief valve, not the bedrock of an entire logical language, as it
> is in Lojban.

As is the case in Gua\spi.

Although tanru are briefer than intersection or place-filling constructions in Lojban and therefore in that way privileged, in fairness I withdraw my "bedrock" remark, because Lojban does avail a number of ways of doing things.

> I don't see anything inherently broken about "small stars",

The trouble is that the set of small things isn't well-defined. It's like
the house in _The Phantom Tollbooth_ where the world's largest giant and
the world's largest dwarf live -- on investigation, they are the same:
an ordinary sized person. Loglan resolves this by not having 'small'
but only 'x1 is smaller than x2', with the usual contextual default
for x2. Lojban has 'x1 is small in property x2 compared with norm x3'.
Just having 'x1 is small' is not going to cut it.

Right, a one-place predicate for "small" would simply be broken. The "standard" place has to be there (x3 in cmalu and x2 in linto), but I don't think it's often a mystery what the standard is in practice.

Loglan is right in a way; logically, "smaller" is a more primitive concept than "small", and "x1 has the size x2" is more primitive still. But I don't know of a natural language that starts with "size" and from that primitive notion derives "smaller" and "small" as well as "larger" and "large". My loglang sketches used to do exactly that though.

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