Re: 'case' and Lojban

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    Lojbab presents some interesting arguments about and against
cases.  My thinking on this has been most subliminal (emotional),
and I feel at this point very unreceptive to case tags.  However
much I feel that they are a corruption and contamination of lojban,
I am unwilling to further that position by faulty logic.
    Lojbab offered an informal proof that if places are cases then
there can not be a limited set of cases that will suffice for lojban.
The basic form of it was to examine lujvo and induction on the number
of gismu being combined.  He suggested that since the number of gismu
involved is unlimited and that each contributes zero or more cases
(places) that any fixed limit would eventually be exceeded.  The flaw
is actually mentioned in presentation of this proof.
> Some places will be eliminated because the lujvo-making in
> effect allowed some variety of one of the terms to fill
> a place in the other term's place structure.
Thus, if there really is a limited set of cases that cover all
possibilities, as the limit was approached, each additional gismu
would fill in as many or more cases as it opened.  There do exist
infinite sequences of integers from the interval [-5,5] that such
that every partial summation is from some interval [0,n].

    Has anyone yet proved that these additonal cases are really
needed?  Or is this just a feature that has been recognized as
offering flexibility and possibly increased expressiveness?

    I find that the corpus of lojban has hardly tested the 
limits of expressiveness without the tagged cases, and am
suspicious of this feature.  Please don't let us "cop out".

    thank you all,
    Arthur Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.