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And I don't hold with xod either that there's no point in formalisation. But I do hold with him that any formalisation of lo'e that does not make explicit a notion of typicality is useless. And if your formalisation of lo'e using buska contains a notion of typicality, I ain't seeing it. Furthermore, your response to pc, "let's see whether my definition of lo'e is internally consistent before we see whether it has anything to do with CLL's lo'e" is, as you'd expect, a red flag. You wanna do that, do it. That's what experimental cmavo are for. Establish that your lo'ei and Lojban lo'e are --- or should be --- the same thing; *then* proclaim their identity. Not before.
The point of all this is, you are not completely wrong. lo'e *is* intensional, and non-countable. But you are making lo'e much more general than it should be, and I continue to find that unacceptable.
Concretely (and CLL pretty much says it): {lo'e cinfo na xabju la gugdrirana}: the typical lion does *not* dwell in Iran. Come up with a formalisation of lo'e which accounts for that, and we're describing the same thing. Until then, we aren't.
As to formalisations, I've given you as much of a formalisation of lo'e as I think is warranted. More concretely, I don't think my formalisation is any less formal than yours. You're trying to sneak in a lambda calculus paraphrase, but you're doing it through the back door, and with nonce gismu; but in the end, you're still defining lo'e through paraphrase. Well, so am I; but I'm capturing the notion of typicality, which you aren't.
I don't think either of these paraphrase approaches are particularly satisfying, btw. I assume that's why you've started talking lambda yourself...
In particular:
It is true to say {lo'e cinfu cu xabju le friko}, because most lions live in Africa most of the time; and *enough* lions live in Africa *enough* of the time, that we are entitled to make a generic claim.
I agree it is true. (I disagree about the reasons, though.)
Then you are disagreeing with the baseline. Because CLL says that's the reason.
What are the properties of the Llamban {lo'e cinfo}?
{lo'e cinfo} does not refer to any particular thing. Are you
asking what the properties of lions are?
I am asking what can be predicated of it. I am asking whether it can be said that {lo'e cinfo cu nakni}, {lo'e cinfo cu fetsi}, {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le friko}, and {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le gugrdirana.}
My understanding is, under baseline lo'e, only the third claim can be made. The other three claims aren't true, because they aren't typical of lions, because they aren't true of enough lions to be tenable generic claims. CLL explicitly says the typical lion cannot be male or female, because there is no clear preponderance.
You've pretty much said:
What is this Llamban you're describing? Does it have anything
to do with me? {lo'e cinfo cu xabju ge le friko gi le gugdrirana}
is true, of course.
No 'of course' about it, I contend. So we aren't describing the same thing. And if lo'e cinfo is in any way derived from {da poi zo'e tu'o ka ce'u cinfo} or whatever, then I don't see how it can be the same thing: your presentation of lo'e is a superset of what is canonically understood by it, because it allows anything predicable of any lion to be predicated of {lo'e cinfo}. And that's not helping.
There's a subtext with why I've all of a sudden gotten so aggro about defining words, which my fellow board members know well. Suffice it to say that you, Jorge, qua individual, can do as you please, and make lo'e mean la, or whatever. As if I could stop you. But when things get ex cathedra (and the baseline is still to be completed, so things are still to be said ex cathedra), lo'e cannot mean la. It must mean what it was prescribed to mean, and what the majority of Lojbanists want it to mean. You may think Lojban is too important to be fettered by the fundies; all I can say is, when it comes to the completion of the baseline, it is too important for it not to be.
Make your lo'e encapsulate the *keyword* for lo'e, Jorge, and we can talk. Until then, we cannot.
-- **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** * Dr Nick Nicholas, Linguistics/French & Italian nickn@hidden.email * University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net * "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the * circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson, * _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. * **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****