misc responses over the last week's postings

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

Several short notes on discussions while I was gone.

1. John Cowan on Nick Nicholas on "which" gave several examples of
Lojban translations of this tricky English word, but missed the most
general one:

la djan po'u   ma        [cu] klama
John,   who is who/which      comes.

This is equivalent to the English 'appositive', expressed as a question:

John who? [comes]

The question asks for another identification of John to more exactly
identify him.  If we weren't dealing with a person, the word "which"
would be more often used in the translation of the question.

2. Nick says:
> But I think writing things like {sefinti}, instead of going for the lujvo
> {selfinti}, is an underestimated resource.

Writing cmavo together is fine for effect, although it can be confusing
unless there is some grammatical consideration for the compound.  "lemi"
and "levi" and "lenu" also survive because they translate to common
natural language constructs (my, this and infinitive/...ing
constructions) even though they are not grammatical units (they also
have history behind them, as according to jimc).

This example of Nicks is however a cmavo appended to a gismu/brivla, and
I strongly dislike it, and not for stylistic reasons.  Simply speaking,
most people don't know the langauge well.  The word LOOKS like a brivla,
and will be taken as one (I suspect that John C.'s parser may even treat
it as one).  It isn't of course - it fails what is called the "tosmabru
test" and the leading sumti falls off, but the average person won't know
this, and think of the 'compound' as a single word.  Even if the reader
does know the morphology, it is more likely to assume that Nick made a
typo in "selfinti" than that he intentionally wrote "sefinti" as one
word, justlike itismore likelythat wordsin Englishwritten together
arenot intentionally so.  Note that Lojban morphology is NOT completely
unambiguous when written without spaces unless stress is marked.

Now in the case of "sefinti" vs "selfinti", it is likely that the
conversion and the lujvo are identical in meaning and in place
structure.  For almost any other cmavo, this is not necessarily the
case.

I think the best guideline to writing words as compounds is to minimize
same.  In some ways, I could see the argument of never writing cmavo as
compounds, but I think the ones I do use have the benefit of aiding the
reader in visually parsing the sentence, even at the possible risk of a
little confusion in substructures.

This is a good guideline to remember - that Lojban, rather more than other
languages, has as a philosophical basis the obligation of the speaker to
make herself/himself clear to the reader/listener, rather than the latter's
obligation to figure out the speaker's stylistically mucked up intent.

3.  think this is Cowan on Nick again:
> >As yet there is no generally accepted way of writing indirect questions.

This isn't exactly correct.  There are several ways of writing indirect
questions, with the most unambiguous being "la'e lu .... li'u"; i.e.
framing the question as a paraphrased quote and referencing it by
indirect pointer la'e.  This is indeed one of the reasons la'e was
invented.  But some find this Zipfeanly (a reference to Zipf's law
favoring short forms for more common usages) unsatisfying and too much
unlike natural languages, so there have been very recent and continuing
but inconclusive discussions of the topic, tied up in a knot with the
question of what goes in the 2nd place of "djuno".

But there IS a way.

4. Nick:
> anyone out there deviate from SVO1O2O3O4 in order to get elisions

I doubt that most people know the grammar well enough to know when they
can and cannot elide. certainly, I have said in the past that this is
one reason for varying the orders.  But even I don't use it that much,
because I'm writing to an audience less fluent than I am.  I probably
use non-standard orders more in my JL all-Lojban writings, but I would
be very suspicious any time I did so to check and see if I'm not just
translating an English idiomatic order.  I doubt that even I have the
fluency to consciously think about stylistic reasons to actually PREFER a
non-standard order while I speak or write.  So except for poetry, I'll
try to keep things simpler for now, assured that the mechanism is there
for times when I or others will need it.

5. Bob Chassell posted several simple Lojban sentences which were generally
excellent - he misspelled cpana as spana in a few of them, but this is a
trivial error.  His only grammatical error was in omitting the "cu" in:

   The man sits on a chair.
   le nanmu zutse    lo stizu

   The man  sitter,  the chair ...

two sumti with no selbri relation.  But even I forget my shoes now and then :^)


6. Nick again:
>Now it's two syllables %^). The debate between tanru and non-tanru is likely
>to be interesting. Read lojbab's Kuwait essay in JL14 WITH THE ABSOLUTELY
>UNFORGIVABLE TRANSLATION OF "what do you mean" BY "do smuni ma" (something

mea culpa, or in Lojban ".u'u", but also ".i'o"

I do prefer explicit place structure usages over tanru constructions
when the place structure is obviously appropriate, but I don't naturally
think in place structures yet, so I place less priority on this than Nora.
But yes, there is a stylistic range in use of tanru vs.place structures vs.
realtive clauses.

7. Nick, answered by Cowan:
>> And let me refashion the place structure of {preti} as
>> x1 is a question, wherein x3 requests that x4 provide a valsi to fill in the
>>sumti tcita/selbri/attitudinal/whatever denoted by x2 in statement/predication
>> x5.
>>
>I think your x1 and x5 refer to the same thing: the question utterance.
>I like this place structure, although lojbab will probably come up with
>something wrong with it (he usually does, which is one of the reasons
>place structures aren't going to be baselined any time soon!).
>One point that comes to mind is that a "preti" isn't necessarily a
>>Lojban< question; if I ask "Who are you?", di'e preti.  If the spirit
>of the definition is to be kept, the place structure needs to be made
>less language-specific.

Who me?  Except for agreeing with John on x5, I like this statement too.  It
appears, at least to me to say what the original said less clearly.  How about
(to be less language specific and keep the order straight):

x1 is a question requesting information x2, asked by x3 of target/respondent x4

Of course, as I think about it, does a question have to be asked by someone
of someone else to be a question?  If not, x3 and x4 may be superfluous.

We probably put them in for "ask" and "answer", but perhaps "danfu cpedu"
as a tanru, with appropriate lujvo and place structure is a better way to
handle these:

dafcpe   x1 requests the answer to question x2 of/from x3 in manner x4

Opinions, anyone?  (Lack of opinions is a more germane reason for not
baselining than my disagreeableness :-)  I am reluctant to make decisions on
such detailed points by myself - to put it simply, I'm human and there are a
lot of place structures for me to make mistakes and inconsistencies on.

8. John Cowan on Nick and Arthur Hyun:
>Nick Nicholas and Arthur Hyun debate about my version of Arthur's sentence:
>
>        dei pamoi le'i mi lojbo jufra
>
>Given that the place structure of "pamoi" is "x1 is the first member of
>set/list/group x2", why the "le'i"?  Doesn't the place structure encapsulate
>the notion of "set", so that "le" is the appropriate article?
>
>The first problem is an error of my own:  "le'i" should have been "lo'i".
>The "lo-" articles differ from the "le-" articles in two ways: they are
>veridical, and they implicitly include everything that meets the
>description.

I disagree - le'i was more correct for two reasons. 1) The original
sentence wasn't grammatically correct (and in any case Arthur wasn't
sure it was), hence John's last clause applies - le'i is fine for "the set of
things I'm describing as pertaining-to-me- Lojbanic-sentences".  In general
le'i is always correct if lo'i is correct.  2) It probably wasn't really
Arthur's first sentence - just his first published one; remember that all
solitary gismu/brivla are complete sentences - and I'm sure Arthur has said
or written at least one of these words before.

The classic distinction between "le" and "lo", which applies to their sets and
masses as well, was JCB's example "That man is a woman" "le nanmu cu ninmu"
said of a figure that the speaker knows is thought by the listener to be a man.

I think someone else correctly pointed out the other salient feature - why a
set "le'i" rather than "le".  A statement about "le" is quantified such that
"ro le su'o selbri", it makes a claim about each of the things being described,
and in a plural situation thus makes several sentence claims, one about each
item being intended by the description.  le'i treats the collection of
individuals as a unit, subject to normal set operations, including ordering
as used in Arthur's sentence.  But some things that can be predicated of
individuals cannot be predicated of sets:  you cannot correctly say
"le'i cribe cu bunre"  "The set of those I describe as bears is brown" because
sets aren't generally characterized by color  (an open question here might be
if a teacher is using colored chalk on a blackboard in talking about Venn
diagrams, and the "bear set" happened to be brown-marked - but even here more
correct would be "lu'e le'i cribe cu bunre"