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At 04:01 PM 12/27/02 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
la nitcion cusku di'e >I note in passing that the gismu definitions do treat sets as n-tuples, >just as Bob's addled recollection leads me to believe. (No, I don't >like what he did. Because I'm stuck trying to clear up the mess. And I >don't give a fuck if the mess is originally James Brown's.) Why else >use sets in the gismu definitions where he did?
Lojbab attempted to distinguish sets from collectives (and I won't try to figure out what an n-tuple is in this context - I would have presumed it to be a set comprised of n members which are ordered, but that makes no sense in the context).
I don't think the mess is JCB's. JCB always used "set" for collectives, and when the logicians tried to restrict "set" to mathematical sets he vetoed them. In Loglan it is "leu" (called "set") that carry the log, and as far as I know it has always been and remained so.
It hasn't. That was JCB revisionism in the two articles on masses from 1995 posted on the www.loglan.org website. From TL 4/3 (November 1980), in which pc summarized (with JCB concurrence) the additions to the language from 1975-80 in what was stated to be an official supplement to Loglan I:
"(Lua and Lue) Each forms a designation of a set or a class as such rather than of their members, as is the case with le and lea [lea in lojban is ro lo]. Lue is analogous to le in that it is "intentional". It designates a particular set which the speaker "has in mind" by his mentioning one or more of the properties shared, or apparently shared, by its members. Thus lue mrenu [lojban le'i nanmu] means 'the set composed of men, or apparent men, which I have in mind'. lu'a [lojban lo'i], in contrast, is like lea. It designates the set composed of all who have the described property or properties. Lua mrenu designates the set composed of all (past, present, and future) men.
To be able to designate sets rather than members of sets is to permit one to say things about their size, their inclusion in or exclusion from other sets, and in other ways to treat them mathematically, logically, and in science, taxonomically. Set designation is not a regularly handled feature of natural language. But in Loglan we require this device to rescue us from the referential ambiguities that plague most natural language discussion of these objects by virtue of the ad hoc arrangements that have been adopted ...
"Clearly the word was added to refer to mathematical sets (and I believe it was added by pc, but that would take more digging to verify). 4th edition Loglan 1 confirms this in its examples, though less clearly:
http://www.loglan.org/Loglan1/chap4.html#sec4.20(that section also defines JCB's intent for loe[lo'e] which has been consistent through the years)
http://www.loglan.org/Loglan1/chap4.html#sec4.9incidentally, discusses the understanding of masses in TLI Loglan prior to the revisionism of 1995 (which if I recall correctly led to the resignation of Randall Holmes, the TLI logician, who could not accept the conflation of mathematical sets and their referents, and the rejection of the mathematical set descriptor as being important).
That text clearly shows that JCB had in mind that masses encompassed substances, "-kind", and the Trobriand Islander concept, though he backed away from the latter in 1995.
Note also that JCB and pc apparently understood the "in mind" aspect of le (and le'e) to be +intentional rather than +specific; I'm not sure when le became -opaque, but suspect that it came from a discussion involving these same parties (Cowan, And, and Jorge) in 1994 including
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9411/msg00073.htmlI suggest people review the discussions of that era in the archives, especially looking for "opaque" and "specific" to see where this debate got started (if you also look for "Iain" you will find where the abstraction place in sisku came from), and perhaps find that we resolved it already.
The problem came when Lojban instituted the new "mathematical
set" category, and then displaced the collective function to
"mass". The collective function, being much more frequent than
the substance function, eventually came to be the canon for
{lei}, and the description of "mass" became the messy conflated
thing.
Reviewing the history, I think that the collective function has been largely ignored or conflated with [ro] lei, which for JCB was merely his equivalent of loi with a restriction or a quantifier. Lojban made an attempt to cover it with girzu (which is explicitly distinguished from the mathematical set which is in x3) as well as jo'u. I don't mind breaking it out in additional cmavo, since we did a partial job with the joi/jo'u distinction.
>Bob says the gismu for collectives might be kampu, The x2 of kampu >is... a set! Ergo, Bob thinks of sets as collectives/tuples. Thanks a >bunch. And x1 of kampu is a property, so it is not clear what it has to do with collectives. From the definition I would have guessed that x1 is a property that each member has, rather than an emergent property of the group as a whole.
I think you are partially right - I think kampu could refer to either individual or emergent properties (and I could be wrong, but I think that ce'u doesn't work properly in a kampu x1, but that is another issue)
I think girzu is the gismu for collective, since it clearly distinguishes the group (x1) from the set (x3). I'll admit to fuzziness at the moment as to the distinction between x2 and x4 of girzu. The history is that there was one place that conflated a defining property and membership (which were accidentally numbered x3 instead of x2). Someone noticed this at the same time that we were also dealing with sumti-raising in place structures, and I decided that this sort of conflation was not acceptable, so we expanded the one place into 3 places, a defining property, a complete set membership, or a relation (du'u) that the group shared in common giving each a separate place. The wording was probably fouled up at some point because we forgot this. Whether this form of breakout was the Right Thing To Do (and whether the three separate places still make sense given the emergence of ce'u), it appears that x1 is the collective and definitely is NOT the set (which is x3), and one of either x2 or x4 is supposed to be the defining property of the set, and the other, the emergent property of the group. The clumsiness of the wording certainly allows us to Make It So when the byfy acts.
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