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Nick:
> And:
> > Nick:
> > > >What the last digit of my phone number is has changed
> > >
> > > Is this different from "the last digit of my phone number has
> > > changed"? I don't see how right now
> >
> > No, but plain NPs can behave semantically like interrogatives
> > -- "She asked the time", "He knows my phone number" (= whatever
> > my phone number is, he knows that it be-phonenumbers me)
> >
> > Change example to: "Who my favourite actor is has changed", and
> > you can see we are dealing with an interrogative clause
>
> In English, yes. In Logic? "my favourite actor" is an intensionally
> defined noun phrase, without a fixed denotation. "who my favourite
> actor is has changed" is crudely equivalent to {la'e lu le te draci poi
> selneirai mi cu cenba}. Not a question
In Logic, I don't know, because I haven't studied the issue thoroughly
enough, and it's too hard for me to see straight to the answer. But
the lesson is that interrogatives (qua grammatical construction) in
English don't have anything specifically to do with questions; rather,
questions are one use for interrogatives. And my hunch is that that
does give us a glimpse into the logic.
Your crude equivalence is so crude as to be wholly unsatisfactory,
because it still fails to escape the extensional reading.
How in Lojban do we get intensionally-defined NPs without a fixed
denotation? Find me a way, and it'll probably go a long way to
handling the stuff that English uses interrogatives for. Of course,
we racked our brains & hunted high and low for a way, so if you
don't find a way then I won't be surprised, but if you do then
I will prostrate myself before you in reverence (as opposed to
the mere affection in which I currently prostrate myself
before you...).
> And in the other example, you give proof that syntactically these are
> questions in English; but at the risk of being disingenuous, I don't
> see why that necessitates they should be considered question-like in
> Lojban, and use {kau}.
No, that's perfectly reasonable, though to the extent that they
currently can be expressed in Lojban, they are expressed with makau
(thanks to xorxes).
> At any rate, I agree that "What I eat depends on
> what's in the fridge" contains semantically full predications, not just
> headless relatives: you can't say "pineapple depends on bananas", but
> "that I should eat pineapples depends on whether there are pineapples
> in the fridge". Dunno whether these are questions; but clearly these
> are not just entities
>
> And since I now realise you really don't intend these all to use {kau},
> I don't quite see where you're going with this. You've professed
> kau-agnosticism, but I take it you won't be heartbroken if The Proper
> Lojban way of saying these un-djuno statements that are indirect
> questions in English ends up not using {kau}
Indeed not, but I wouldn't be surprised if that kau-less method
would generalize to indirect questions, if it was logically sound
rather than some ad hoc contrivance created out of more desperation
than sense.
I would like to take some time to think about how to say these in
Lojban, but at the moment keeping up with email is the most I can
manage!
> "What I eat depends on what's in the fridge" and "John differs from
> Jane in who their favourite actor is" are quite a spanner in the works
> for my attempt to link {kau} to {djuno}; this I admit. (The first more
> so than the second.)
>
> > xod's praise for who and what? I thought xod thinks jboske is trying
> > to pin down mirages
>
> For me checking what the literature outside Lojban says about these
> issues. He's not necessarily wrong, you know. jboske does have to
> demonstrate the ability to make meaningful distinctions
>
> [Sampson trashing formal semantics]
> > Which book is that?
>
> "Making Sense". Any thoughts on it?
Don't know it. Never heard of it!
> I did just skim it, but this is
> clearly a guy who doesn't hold his tongue.
Indeed. He's a kind of libertarian conservative and an elected member
of local government representing the Conservative Party. He had put
up on his website, among much other stuff about politics, linguistics,
etc., a discussion about research showing that it is quite natural
for people growing up in a racially homogeneous environment to not
be colour-blind or even to not be at ease with other races, and that
liberal guilt-trippers should not flagellate themselves over their
own biologically-determined cognitive processes. Because he is a
member of the Conservative Party, the salivating press grabbed hold
of this, scenting the opportunity to create a new scandal about
Tory racism, so reported him as arguing that racial prejudice is
legitimate, and got sundry ill-informed people to condemn him. The
upshot was that he was suspended from his professorial position.
I didn't check what the outcome was.
This story is particularly apt, given your remarks below about
historical lx & Nazis.
> (I was all the more
> surprised his review of CLL was so positive; then again, the guy does
> do computational linguistics...)
He's a maverick. Not being dismissive of Lojban is a maverick stance.
> > The stuff where we talk about meaning and try to work out what a
> > Lojban sentence means is fun. When it starts to get political and
> > we argue about which meaning is best for a given cmavo, things
> > start to get painful, and I long for a way to shortcut the
> > argument
>
> But inasmuch as we are responsible to a language community (and I
> believe we are), we have to do politics. If this was Lojban Mark II,
> you could define whatever you wanted wherever. But we operate under
> constraints. And currently, I am charged to enforce them. At the right
> time and place, but that is my charge
Sure, sure. But it's painful, all the same. Maybe once BF processes
have taken shape and been thrashed out, it'll get smoother.
> Historical linguistics would be easier if you didn't have to worry
> about Nazis using your results; fieldwork would be easier if you could
> just cart the words home and not worry about the troublesome natives
> and their preposterous claims of language ownership. Unfortunately, we
> don't get away with that any longer: linguists are answerable to the
> language communities they work with.
You're a very well-balanced person. I'm the sort of person who'd ignore
the Nazis and the natives and the press. (Except when my job depends
on it; I'd rather keep my job than speak my mind.)
> Formal semantics is as ivory-tower
> removed from that kind of ethical conundrum as you can get.
Thank Fokk.
> Yet by
> choosing Lojban over Ceqli, as an engelang with a community, you
> volunteer yourself for that same bind: that community stays together
> because it expects a certain stability. Or at least, it has convinced
> itself of this
I know, I know. I was only moaning. Just having a grumble.
> So we will have a messy compromise: Lojban will not be as clean as we
> like it to be. And any overarching cleanliness, like I say, has to be
> done on the formalists' own dime -- not right now, and not forcing the
> entire community to join in, because it won't. Thing about compromises:
> noone walks away happy. The naturalists will get prescriptive hocus
> pocus they will squirm under. But the formalists won't get all that
> much stuff in at all, if it has to pass through universal consensus.
> And so it goes; and that's what it will take for us to stay together.
> Factions exist for good reason, you say. So does politics
Oh well. You're quite right of course.
--And.