Re: Examples of unambiguous nonsense?

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>]

The obvious kinds of nonsense can be easily said in English, but will
tend to cause a double take:

le cmana cu klama la muxamad.
The mountain comes to Mohammed.

If one gets really weird, the English double-take gets strained to the
breaking point:

le cmana cu klama la muxamad. fu lo karce
The mountain comes to Mohammed by car.

Another area where ambiguityu causes nonsense to be thrown out is what we have
called sumti-raising in Lojban.

mi troci lenu le vorme cu kalri
I try the event that the door is open. (by me?)

??? mi troci le vorme
I try the door.
Since the x2 of troci is an event that x1 is trying to bring about, the English
is a very boor translation, though a literal one.  IN this case the door
is an 'event' that is tried (in TLI Loglan terms "le po darto" perhaps, but
stated instead as "le darto").  Since doors are not events, this is nonsense
in both Lojban and English (and TLI Loglan). But you CAN say it in Lojban and
at least try to figure out what it means.  Most importantly, and this I believe
is the claim that JCB traditionally made, you can manipulate this statement
logically, whether it has a useful meaning or not.  In English, I can think of
no clear way to even explain how le vorme/(le darto) in an event clause
differs from "le nu vorme"(le po darto) in a place struture that expects an
event clause in that place.  It is sayable in Loglan/Lojban, but not really
in English.

Note that Lojban has the feature no present in TLI Loglan of allowing such
an argument to be 'raised' after the manner of natural languages, while still
preserving its proper semantic level.  The marker "tu'a" specifies an event
such that the argument so marked is a place therein.  Thus

mi troci tu'a le vorme
I try  (that) the door (does something; i.e. becomes open).

which is a short way of saying
mi troci lenu le vorme cu kalri binxo
I try    the event the door open-becomes

which I think in TLI Loglan is
mi trati lepo le darto ga kapni cenba

ButL1 does not indicate any way for TLI Loglan to do the equivalent of tu'a.
There certainly has been a lot of historical misuse of place structures in
the Loglan community to try saying the longer expression using the shorter
mi troci le vorme/mi trati le darto,
but such misabbreviation spoils the ability to have the shorter expression
properly be interpreted as its nonsensical actual denotation.

----
lojbab                                                      lojbab@grebyn.com
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273

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