What binxo means

[cbmvax!uunet!pic.ucla.edu!jimc]

The original discussion was on the need for the reciprocal operator soi,
but now it's on the adequacy of binxo "become".  Let's translate "my rat
died" using the interpretation of binxo that John Cowan gave, with a 
backmap of what this really means in its full glory:

  lemi ratcu cu binxo lo morsi
  At present my (present) rat is identical to at least one small stiff,
  but formerly there was no stiff that my (former) rat was identical to.

(The "at least one" part comes from binxo, not lo).  Now suppose someone
came up with this sentence from the lesson 1 exercises:

	la banthas. du lo mlatu		Bantha is (sic) a cat

We would tell the student "that's very nice, but the preferred way to say
that is..."

	la banthas. mlatu		Bantha cats

In other words, Lojban has predicates in its foundation, and prefers to
use them.  Now I say the same thing about binxo; the meaning "become"
*ought* to be rendered with a predicate analogously to "la banthas.
mlatu".  However, I see no gismu with a more suitable set of arguments
than binxo.  

In a previous message I said "binxo means 'x1 changes so event x2 becomes
true'", and John didn't like either the content or the event of saying.
Let me half apologize and half not apologize.  I don't mean to speak
authoritatively so as to imply "the LLG has adopted (the above) meaning
for binxo", which is manifestly false.  

However, as has been said many times, the focus of LLG work has been
mainly on morphology and grammar, and the semantics of the words,
specifically the place structures, are to be worked on in a near-future
phase.  For the present the Old Loglan definitions are used, with a few
hacks on the worst infelicities.   Thus when one sees 

	binxo  bix     bi'o become          become...under conditions...

one has very little guidance for what fits in the "..."  Into this
vacuum comes I, having sweated over exactly this problem since 1979
(gee, is it that long?)  It is hard not to say "binxo means..." where
politeness requires "binxo ought to mean... convince convince
convince", particularly when the focus is not on the meaning of binxo
but on how a reciprocal relation suddenly vanishes when a second
predicate gets into the act.

In the future I will try to say "ought to mean", but I plan not to clog
up net bandwidth with convincing arguments unless someone asks me
specifically, so as not to detract from the focus of the discussion.

Now, back to the content.  When I define "x1 changes so event x2 becomes
true" it's to be interpreted very much like my rendition above of sumti
binxo:

	lemi ratcu cu mrobi'o			My rat died
	lemi ratcu cu binxo (le nu lemi ratcu cu morsi)
	lemi ratcu cu cenba			My rat changed 
	  .ija lemi pu ratcu pu na morsi	My former rat wasn't dead
	  .ija lemi ca ratcu ca morsi		My present rat is dead

In other words, for each referent coming into x1 two predicate relations
(or sumti identity relations in John's place structure) are synthesized, 
one for an earlier process step and one later.  (The process is usually
timelike but not always.)  This is how an event "changes to become 
true"; there are two events, one is false and one is true.  

You can see how attractive "mrobi'o" is to express the idea of "died",
but either the user has to memorize the meanings and places of a
zillion individually crafted lujvo (one for each non-become-meaning
gismu and lujvo, plus similar lists for each of the gismu common in
compounds, like "stop", "force", "believe", etc. etc.), or there must
be rules that let the user boil down a lujvo (or tanru) to a collection
of phrases like "x1 binxo le nu x1 morsi".  And in order for the
synthesized phrases to mean something, it is necessary to replicate
arguments into them -- a capability which turns out to be useful for
explicit event arguments too.

One item about binxo that isn't too clear is what gets replicated,
words or referents.  In the examples above I replicated the words of x1,
once with "pa" and once with "cu" to get "my former/present rat". 
Given my emphasis on postponing the calculation of referent sets to the
very end, this is the choice I prefer.  An attractive alternative is to
consider each x1 referent to have a history or process trajectory, and
in the earlier-later relations to trace along that history.  While
conceptually attractive to humans, this model would be quite difficult
to program in a database handler and would require specialized support
just for binxo. However, when the words are replicated and the 
earlier-later copies are individually bound they will latch onto the
history automatically, if there is one, and the individual support
would be confined to generating the two relations, a much easier task.

		-- jimc