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Comments from pc on various issues



Some of this is relevant to everyone, whereas other things may make sense
only to lojbab; I am posting the whole anyhow.

1) I bounced the idea of using unbound "da" within "ka" abstractions to
signify a propositional function off pc; he agrees that it is the Right
Thing.  Any other scheme, he says, for representing (lambda (x) ...x...)
with an explicit arg-list would be intolerably clumsy.

2) I am now engaged in writing the paper on anaphora. pc agrees that this
term has been wildly overextended in the past.  Only the ri-series and
the go'i-series are truly anaphora (because only they create repetition --
the literal meaning of the word).  Most other KOhA and GOhA cmavo are in
fact "deixis" -- they point to something, rather than repeating something.
This includes the "di'u" and "di'e" series, which point to things in the
linguistic stream rather than in the Real World, but nonetheless point.

3) I asked him how to express analogy, "A is to B as C is to D; A:B::C:D".
I had only come up with:

        .abu simsa by. le te simsa be dy. bei cy.
        A is-similar-to-B in-property-the property-of-similarity-of D and C

which requires inverting D and C (because "cy. simsa dy. zo'e" converts as
"zo'e te simsa dy. cy."), and is distressingly lacking in symmetry.
He proposed the alternative:

        le ka .abu simsa by. cu dunli le ka cy. simsa dy.
        the property-of A being-similar-to B equals
                the property-of C being-similar-to D

4) I asked him about the referents of "le sumti" and "le bridi" -- are they
linguistic objects, or the referents of those linguistic objects.  In
the sentence "mi klama le zarci", is the sumti "mi", a text, or John Cowan,
a person?  pc and lojbab both thought they were texts.  Occasional English-
language use has been fuzzy, but the current place structures of "sumti"
and "bridi" do not suggest linguistic objects.  I propose, therefore,
changing them from the current place structures:

        x1 is a/the argument of predicate/function x2 filling place x3

and

        x1 (du'u) is a predicate relationship with relation x2

by adding "(text)" after sumti x1 and x2, and changing "du'u" to "text" after
bridi x1.

                among arguments (sequence/set) x3
--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.