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At 05:39 PM 1/11/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> No one paid > attention to most of your discussions, and several of us generally rejected > the basic assumptions of your reasoning so the reasoning proves > nothing. As far as I am concerned, all of jboske (and jbioske arguments on > the main list count as well) before Nick convenes the byfy constitute > merely one possible argument which will have to be made from scratch, > because none of us are going to be willing to read all that garbage - we > weren't the first time, and it won't happen this timeJboske wants to be able to settle linguistic issues through reasoned discussionwithin a shared set of guiding principles.
What are the guiding principles? I don't sense that there is a single set.
> >All the supposed lack of self-evidence concerns the use of tu'o=mo'ezi'o > >as a quantifier, not the interpretation of tu'o as mo'ezi'o. AFAIK that > >was controversial only because of the ma'oste entry > > I don't understand that paragraph You saw people arguing about the use of a null operand as a quantifier. You misinterpreted this as people arguing about whether the prescription makes tu'o mean "null operand".
I see people using tu'o as a quantifier, and the usages are not self-consistent (as Nick noted with his 3 varieties of tu'o) and are not consistent with tu'o as operand and tu'o as pure number.
"Null operand" only comes into play when trying to fit CLL's tu'o into the cmavo list tu'o. CLL exemplifies one major use of tu'o, perhaps the only one which he thought was well-defined, and people seem to have generalized from the one usage differently than they did from the cmavo list (as demonstrated in usage, since we agree that the elliptical tu'o cannot be derived from CLL, it must be from the ma'oste.).
Because you don't understand jboske debates, you don't understand which issues are subject to controversy among jboskeists and which issues aren't. I know you don't care; I was just responding to your attempt to cite previous jboske debate to prove that a certain issue had been controversial.
The problem is that the jboske debate led to usage in the non-jboske community by you and Jorge, which was then emulated by a few others who probably think Jorge's example was correct. So if later jboske debate finds that tu'odu'u is incorrect, it will not be evident in usage, where 90% of the tu'o usage is tu'odu'u. The natural usage that was evolving from the ma'oste, was shunted in a new contradictory direction by an analysis that may have been faulty. This makes me dislike analysis as an influence on usage until usage is strong enough to resist analysis that may be faulty. (e.g. the way English usage usually resists the bastardizations imposed by prescriptivists who see a system that isn't really part of the language).
> > The point is that it mustn't
> >be ambiguous and it mustn't happen willynilly; it has to be part of the
> >prescribed meaning of the word
>
> The prescribed meaning of the word is the cmavo list definition. It is not
> ambiguous until you present an example where we can't tell from context
> which is intended.
A. {li tu'o va'a ny du li ci vu'u ny}
If tu'o means "mo'e zi'o" then A is false.
If tu'o means "mo'e zo'e" then A is true if zo'e is interpreted
as 3, and false otherwise.
If tu'o means "mo'e zo'e a zi'o" then A is true if zo'e is
interpreted as 3, and false otherwise.
If A is true if zo'e is interpreted as "3", then why do we want anything else?zo'e means "some value that makes the sentence true" zi'o is appropriate if no value makes sense at all as in Cowan's example of an untranslatable joke.
> > From CLL we can extract some shreds that can form at least the basis of a > > language prescription. And even these meagre shreds you want to drown in > > the excrement of dubitability > > > >All you succeed in doing is in magnifying or manufacturing disdain for CLL > >qua prescription > > I have disdain for the assumption that CLL is the only prescription, and > consider your argument two-faced because you are perfectly willing to throw > out the CLL prescription when your argument requires it. Thus your > claiming scriptural qualities to the document rings hollow to me If you are saying that my work on AL invalidates my right to discuss SL, then you are preaching schism.
No I am saying that. I am arguing that to argue that CLL is scriptural over the cmavo list, requires that it is always scriptural. You (seem to) want it to be scriptural over the cmavo list, but not over independent analysis.
But at any rate, the desire to be understood does not override other considerations.
This baffles me. A language that is not understood is not a language. 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