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Re: [jboske] RE: fundamentalism as fundamental (RE: Re: gadri paradigm:2 excellent proposals




la nitcion cusku di'e

Ok, I have had my response to your lo'ei for some time, we never argued
it, and nor  will we now. I'll put it up now again.

You're funny. "This is what I have to say, but don't bother
me with any arguments because I won't respond."

First, you know how badly your buska went with me; it's dousing flames
with gasoline to think it'd work with Jordan.

I've no idea what your problem with it is. It means
"person x1 looks for object x2", very transparent.
If you don't like that it is of gismu form, I can
change it to a proper fu'ivla, but it is meant to be
used to explain this definition of lo'ei only, not
proposed as an actual word for usage.

You yourself admit that, if we have a landing site for a prenex, lo'ei
isn't needed. So:

mi djica lo mikce =
su'o da poi mikce zo'u: mi djica lenu da co'e

I don't agree with that exactly. I do agree with:

mi djica lo mikce =
su'o da poi mikce zo'u: mi djica da

Wanting {da} and wanting {le nu daco'e} may have very
similar meanings, but they are not logically equivalent.

mi djica lo'ei mikce =
mi djica lenu su'o da poi mikce zo'u: da co'e

Again, if you mean it as an approximation, that's correct.
If you mean it as a logical equivalence, it is wrong. But
yes, that's the drift of the idea.

We don't have prenexes wherever we might need them: we have them for
djica and djuno and nitcu, we sidestep them with ka...ce'u for sisku.
But they might turn up in other preds, where we have no embedded
proposition to put a new prenex in front of.

Correct. In {buska} for example, the way I defined it. Which is
a perfectly acceptable meaning for a lojban predicate to have.

The formal semantics mainstream answer, since 1974, has been to allow
prenexes mid-sentence, whether there is an embedded proposition there
or not.

Which is not something we can do in Lojban, unless you want to
say that {lo'ei} does that.

The minority answer is propositionalism, assuming that there are
*always* embedded propositions.

Again not an option for Lojban. We can define as many prediacates
as we like that take propositions, but that doesn't stop us from
creating other predicates (lujvo, fu'ivla) that don't take
propositions.

It's assumed that, when you imagine something, that something is
intensional (you can look for something that doesn't exist, and you can
also write about something that doesn't exist.) Montague would tell you
you're describing [for some x] x. Propositionalism will tell you you're
describing {lenu su'o da zo'u: da co'e}.

I posted a paper here recently, which said propositionalism was crap,
because it couldn't come up with a consistent co'e for imagining (or
finding).

I read it yes, very interesting.

You might also try the Lojbanic {mi skicu leka ce'u prenrtlingana}. Be
careful you don't say {mi skicu lo ckaji be leka ce'u prenrtlingana},
though --- that claims Klingons exist (su'o da poi prenrtlingana zo'u:
mi skicu...} --- {lo} is veridical.

We agree about {mi skicu lo ckaji}. But describing {le ka ce'u
prenrtlingana} is very different from describing a Klingon.
If I say "it has a single argument" I am doing the former, but
not the latter, at least not in the same sense.

This is a big lurking problem. I think Jorge's solution is a kludge. A
non-kludge is either not going to fit Lojban (prenexes mid-sentence?),
or be terribly disruptive (describing lambda expressions?)

So what do we do? Bury our heads in the sand?

And we'll leave it for another day, for Christmas' sake...

Okey :) season's greetings everyone, ho, ho, ho...

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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