Re: repost of my response to Nick of last month

[Nick Nicholas <nsn@MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU>]

#>To Logical Language Group respond I thus:
#>I learn more about lujvo --- and my attitude towards them --- every day.
#This was my argument that we are still probably premature in being
#prescriptive about lujvo places.  If YOU, who have analyzed the problem
#the most, are having your attitudes change day by day with relatively
#little competing analyses from the rest of us laggards, what will happen
#when we get a group of people all of whom know and use the language as
#well as you do, but who might have different analyses, on the order of
#the current ZAhO discussion.  At that point, we will either be stuck
#with a prematurely set in concrete status quo, or some people like you
#who have sunk a lot of work into a particular analysis are going to have
#to deal with competing or changing ideas that will render much of the
#work obsolete.

I am (to the assembled audience's great surprise :) ) aware of this problem;
for this reason, I pay heed to the convenient fact that vacuous assertions
are hard to contradict :) . What I've tried to present in my article is not
so much a set of hard rules (though my paedagogical urges may have taken
over), as a way of thinking about lujvo. It's no coincidence that the bulk
of the article in fact isn't setting rules at all, but discussing where
such rules might not be adequate.

Even so, the paper (I would like to think :) is not entirely vacuous. I
do make some claims in it, some of which are more well-founded than others.
The extensive comments I've received from Jorge (who approaches lujvo
in a more formalist manner than I) have become something of a challenge
for that reason. But I do want the work to be set up in such a manner
that, though details of wording and particular place structures can become
obsolete, the essence of the work --- the manner of approaching lujvo ---
needn't.

#Thus my argument is that people who make lujvo should propose place
#structures for them based on what the concept they are trying for is,
#and we should be doing more reconciliation of your theoretical framework
#with what people actually do...

I made a point of doing so when I first assigned place structures last
year, but there is seldom such data to go on (and nowadays, the data has
become coloured by my work, it would seem! :) And I do reserve the right
to say (as I did with {jdaselsku}) "This place structure is not well-thought
out" --- not just because I say so, but, well, because it is! :)

#>The attitude I've taken is that, if you have to delete a
#>tertanru place, and it's not because it overlaps with a seltanru place
#>(Lean Lujvo), then I'm using the wrong tertanru.
#..., which might of course result in suggesting a different lujvo.

'Must', in fact, I would say.

#>Come to think of it though, this distinction between omitting tertanru
#>places when they're overlapped by the seltanru, and leaving them in when
#>they aren't, is a bit artificial, isn't it.  Hm.  I think Lojbab may be
#>right after all.  Any ideas?
#...  But instead, what it might reveal is what places are important to a
#concept.  And this is the essential point that I see being lost.  In my
#comment about kabryselmre, I was arguing that the true concept covered
#by karyselmre probably entails that there be a lo merli.  BUT, we have
#the option, in making a lujvo (unlike in making a tanru), of deciding
#that the essence of the CONCEPT WE WANT TO CLAIM, will not require such
#explicit places.  Thus we are doing a defacto "zi'o" deletion through
#ellipsis - the place may or may not have a value, but is not important
#to the claim, so we ellipsize it.

I have said as much (or at least, strongly implied it) in my article. It's
just that, at least as far as the tertanru is concerned, I am less
comfortable these days with such deletion than I once was. The veljvo
can quite easily be simply wrong --- and misleading. We shouldn't be
arbitrary with our veljvo. Though by the same token, there is a point
beyond which we should just get on with using the lujvo, and not bothering
about artificially inserted places noone would use anyway. It's a judgement
call.

#What I would like to see is to use the systematic procedures to come up
#with the theoretical m,aximum set of places, and then use pragmatics -
#why someone would create a lujvo for this concept rather than leaving it
#a tanru, for example, or what the essentials are in related concepts in
#other languages - use these to decide which places to "zi'o" out, or
#Lean-Lujvo out if you prefer, as being places that are so unimportant or
#obvious to most or all pragmatic applications of the concept that it
#makes no sense to require them.

I'm *not* being sycophatic when I say that I fully agree. I guess I should
insert that bit I meant to in my paper, about how the 'algorithm' of place
structure determination goes, because indeed the first thing you do is
get a maximum (eliminating redundancies), and then whittle it down by
eliminating what I termed irrelevancies, and you consider pragmatic omissions.

#Deleting them DOES have truth-functional
#and semantic import - the leaner concept is inherently more broad since it
#presumably could include related concepts where the omitted place has an
#unexpected or important value, as well as the basic concept for which
#the omitted place is unimportant and expected.

Indeed. I can see an extension of the paper here...

#I am talking about pragmatic deletion of places, and not place strutures
#wherein the place being omitted is being so omitted because THERE IS NO
#POSSIBLE VALUE which makes the statement true.  I might accept some of
#these as lujvo, but think that is a rare occuramce, and proibably the
#omission of the place is sufficently important that we would WANT to
#have it made explicit in the lujvo that we are doing something
#nonstandard woth the lujvo.

I'm not sure I understand what kind of lujvo you're alluding to here. These
sound like lujvo with wrong veljvo.

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