Re: Lojban duplications

[cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc]

Art Protin <usl!protin@USL.USL.COM> writes:
> While I will accept that some of the add-on-places are really
> restrictive clauses, I am not receptive to a limted, bounded, definitive
> list other than the numbered places.  My understanding of lojban/Loglan
> NEVER had this hangup about unfilled places.

A recent post of mine shows what a pain it is to be stuck with a
rigidly specified set of "essential" places -- yet I feel it isn't
possible to claim Lojban is a "logical" language unless at least some
effort is made to specify precisely what the predicate relations are.
Or to state the contrapositive: Lojbab says that in order to be a
"real" language, a conlang has to allow that the places of gismu, and
both places and core definition of lujvo, are as renegotiable as a
government contract, so that (jimc's inference) it's impossible to
state in a public or global manner what the predicate relations are.
Therefore it's impossible for a "real" language, constructed or not, to
be a predicate language.  I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong
(yet); but I don't like it one little bit.

Nonetheless, it's clear to me that there are too many numbered places
on some gismu (e.g. the transport means on some but not all motion
words) yet essential places leap out at you that you never would have
thought of when writing the dictionary (e.g. river of WHAT, or the
transport means on cadzu, where I really needed it to make "crawl"),
and intermixed with these are the pervasive context and supplementary
places which are clearly not essential parts of the relation (e.g.
speaker ID, or language of expression, or exemplar, or I think tenses).

Bob Chassell's point is well taken that the predicate relation is the
key to predicate languages.  Art's is well taken that you need to be
able to decline to state the occupants of various places.  And Lojbab's
point is well taken that if we're going to use the language in real
life, we can't afford to get bogged down with infinitely many junk
places.

When dealing with problems like this one, I find it very useful to make
a mechanistic computational model -- the database or Prolog model is
very applicable to predicate languages, and has the advantage that
eventual AI code can be modelled 1-1 on the theory.  When you phrase
the theoretical arguments in terms of the model, you can then test
consequences and have clear results which you can evaluate.  In
particular, the debate about unfilled places can be phrased in terms
of, what variable, anonymous or otherwise, belongs in the vacant
places, and what do you do with referent set members that match the
prototype thus constructed?  A question like that is much easier to
discuss, than to discuss the "reality", such as it is, of Lojban or
natural languages.

                -- jimc