Re: response to art protin on 'nu'

[cbmvax!uunet!PRC.Unisys.COM!dave]

> Now, people, anyone want to try to explain how these four subclasses of events
> apply to the event of sleeping, generally spoken as "nu sipna".  True, we
> USUALLY think of sleeping as a state - but Lojban frees you from that
> constraint allowing you to think of sleeping as an activity or a process.

Certainly the normal interpretation of sleeping is as a state.
Wakefulness is also a state.  "Waking up" is a state transition.
Lojban may "free" you from these interpretations, but they are
nonetheless the most "correct" categorization, and the default Lojban
usage should be to treat sleep as a state.  This is not to say that
other usages should be discouraged; they should be used to emphasize
different aspects of "sleeping," and avoided when emphasis is not
intended.

In this context, "achievement" does not refer to a laudable victory,
but merely to the culmination of an activity.  (I mention this in case
any reader is not familiar with the Aristotelian categorization of
events.)  To "achieve" sleep is the end result of the process of
falling asleep.  I might say, for example, that at midnight I was in
the process of falling asleep; at 12:27 I achieved sleep; at 12:45 I
was in the sleep state.

Note that the process here was that of falling asleep; I think it
makes little sense to speak of the process of sleeping, unless one is
discussing research into the stages of sleep, or the like.  If sleeping
IS spoken of as a process, I would have to guess that it was being
used in the sense of recuperating; that is, as an (extended)
transition from fatigued to refreshed.

The only reason that occurs to me to treat sleep as an activity is for
consistency with a question that presupposes an activity.  "What is
John doing?"  "He is sleeping."  However, the main reasons for
answering in this way would appear to be (1) courtesy, i.e. not
contradicting the questioner, ("He's not doing anything, he's
asleep.")  and (2) using the parallelism to indicate syntactically
that the question is being responded to, rather than ignored in favor
of another topic ("He's asleep." has the wrong syntactic form for a
response to this question.)

BTW, Lojban is to be lauded for providing general mechanisms to
distinguish these categories.  General mechanisms are usually
preferable to special constructions.  However, at least in this case,
Lojban does not "free" the English-speaking user from any constraints,
since English fully supports discussion of the process of falling
asleep, the achievement of sleep, and the state of sleep, as I have
done in the paragraph above that refers to clock times.

English does not readily support the "activity of sleeping", but as
this strikes me as somewhat nonsensical anyway, I feel that in this
case English wins over Lojban by virtue of making it harder to talk
nonsense in English.  (Oooh, I can feel the flames already!)  If
someone wishes to take me to task for this statement, please realize
that I have already considered the possibility that my evaluation is
mere cultural bias, brought about by the fact that my native language
is English--and I'm not convinced.


-- Dave Matuszek (dave@prc.unisys.com)  I don't speak for my employer. --
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| Flon's Axiom:                                                         |
|   "There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming       |
|    language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs." |
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