another response on old posting - lujvo-making

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

In a posting last month (the same as I respond to in another posting
tonight) John Cowan responds to an anonymous person:
>> Rather than lean gismu or fat lujvo, I argue for weaking place
>> structure.  That each successive place of the word is weaker in
>> its tie to the concept.
>>     For example: 'going' is central to 'klama'.  A goer
>> is the closest likely relation to going, thus X1 is for the goer.
>> A destination is next closest/most-likely relation to going, thus
>> X2 is the destination.  At some point things related to going are
>> sufficiently unlikely to be spoken of and/or sufficiently remotely
>> connected to the action that we rely on the modifier words to
>> attach places to connect them, like the reason for going, the time
>> of going, the source of energy for going, the cost of going, etc.
>
>I think this analysis is very useful, although not absolutely true.

It also makes an incorrect presumption about how places were selected
and ordered in the place structures.  In some cases, of course, we were
merely patterning after English or some natural language, in deciding
places and orders.  In some cases, places were chosen so as to move
likely abstractions to the end of the place structure, where there would
be less need for elidables.  More recently, we have tended to play games
with moving agents to x1, and then deleting agents where it is
plausible, since the agent can be added in more clearly than it can be
deleted if there is an agent-less predicate that is related and
meaningful.  To adopt this analysis, we would have to analyze the place
structures yet again to be consistent with the principle, and it ain't
gonna happen.  It would also play havoc with Nick's lujvo place
structures system, since it is quite plausible that an unimportant place
in a gismu could become important in a lujvo based on the gismu, and
there is (I presume, not having studied Nick's work carefully) no
principles for reordering such places based on some ad hoc 'importance'
criteria.  (I think it needs to be allowed, of course, when there is a
good reason, one of the reasons I am skeptical of algorithmic lujvo
place structures.

lojbab

lojbab