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At 12:47 PM 10/9/02 -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
Here is a summary of my thoughts on ni, yet again, but this time because I was asked: Conceived to provide a quantitative counterpart to the qualitative ka, it is redundant with jei and it's based on a deprecated notion of ka. The deprecated sense of ka to which ni is bound was the miserable result of the conflation between the English "redness" as the property of being red (that's ka ce'u xunre; that which is shared by all red things) and the amount of redness (that's jei ko'a xunre; it is 54% red).
That is not what jei means, though the two are similar in meaning IFF the scale of quantity is from 0 to 1.
jei ko'a xunre du pimuvomeans that the truth value of "X is red" is .54 on some kind of fuzzy logic scale. In other words, it is 54% true that ko'a is red. This may or may not mean that it is a color blend which is 54% red and 46% na'e xunre. That would constrain fuzzy logic usage too much, IMO.
ni ko'a xunre du pimuvomeans that there is X's redness is measured as .54 units on some scale, which may or may not be a unitary one.
Now it happens that colors often are often defined such that truth value overlaps with quantity measurement. But most other concepts do not mix purely, and the measure of X-ness is usually NOT the same as "the truth value of (ko'a Xs)". To argue about "ni" solely on the basis of color seems to intentionally limit the concept.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email 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