Re: Bob Chassells' text and sumti-raising

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

la lojbab cusku di'e:
> ... The place structure of all tanru is that of the
> final term, so what Bob has really said in (2) is:
> 
> >    gi  na'e       porpi      rinka  ri
>      and other-than-breakingly causes the lock.
> 
> a) The thief did not cause the lock, breakingly, nonbreakingly, or
>    otherwise.  What he presumably did was other-than-cause the lock to
>    break.  This might be expressed in Lojban as:
> 
>      gi  na'e       rinka le nu     ri spofu/porpi               (4)
>      and other-than cause the-event it is-broken/breaks
> 
> It would be very difficult to turn this into a proper tanru with the
> place structure Bob sought.  The closest I can come ... 

It sounds like you are bending over backwards to reinvent diklujvo while 
avoiding precisely specified transformation rules... as you discuss later.

> These are both sophisticated and very Lojbanic, and difficult for the
> English speaker to grasp.  By comparison, neither Bob, John Cowan, or
> Nora noticed a problem with "ri" in the effect place of rinka - they
> knew what it meant, even though what he said was something else.

A big advantage of the diklujvo rules: they match forms like (2)
familiar at least to me (and I assume they are at least somewhat
congenial to natives of other languages, though we should ask such
speakers).  Interpreted with the diklujvo rules as applied to tanru (on
the model that a lujvo is an abbreviation for a tanru and the main job
is rule-based interpretation of the tanru), Bob's original sentence
maps to exactly the ones you derived through sumti-raising -- but
through specific teachable rules, not through vague notions.  

If you say "the tanru term ahead of a main term wanting an abstraction
in x2 should become the x2 selbri, with the original x2 going into its
x1" (which was your algorithm and which you implied could be taken as
an informal but widely used general rule), then you restate in a
restricted form the most common pattern for a type 1 diklujvo.  Why do
you reject familiar, natural speech patterns and misinterpret them as
"trying to program humans as if  they were computers"?  

> I have argued against jimc that just such effects will occur.  It is
> short and convenient to sumti-raise, and people LIKE
> vague-but-natural-seeming tanru.  They do not and will not perform all
> the sophisticated analysis that jimc's computer will in analyzing his
> 'diklujvo' - 

I also recognized the natural tendency.  Rather than fighting it, and
rather than saying "it's inherently weed-minded and can't be made
specific", I produced a description of what people (the one(s) who
would hold still for analysis) wanted to say, and provided a way for
them to say it that was just as logical and definite as the rest of our
various predicate languages. And I find it efficient and easy to whip
up these diklujvo on the fly; it's not a burdensome over-computational
set of rules as you seem to think.  Come on, give it a chance!

		-- jimc