Re: cukta

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Nick writes:
> And this one of the areas I was thinking about, when I said the other day
> that Lojban will probably succeed by failing in its avowed aims. Lojban
> (I claim) is built on a particular view of semantics: one in which {le jei
> da broda} is taken as 0 or 1 --- one in which you can make black or white
> judgements. X either is a book, or isn't. In that context, it is *meaningful*
> to ask "is a collection of blank pages bound together a book or not?"
>
> Now prototype semantics, which is a more, I dunno, postformal view of
> semantics, would go for a fuzzy logic approach to le jei da broda, rather
> than a truth-conditional approach. What is a book? Well, a book has certain
> prototypical properties: it has pages, it has text printed on these pages,
> it conveys recorded discourse. If something has all these properties, it's
> a book. If it has none of them, it's no book.

A couple of years ago I wrote on Lojban list that it would be in keeping
with the explicitness of the description of Lojban syntax and that
part of semantics treatable in formal, logical ways, if the meanings
of gismu (and lujvo etc) were given explicit prototype definitions.
That is, to me the spirit of the Lojban enterprise is its explicitness,
not its use of logic, or what have you.

Lojbab replied that prototype definitions were not determined in
advance, and would evolve as the language was used. This struck me,
and strikes me, as a bit incoherent: in order to use gismu one
must have at least an implicit idea of what they mean, so why not
make the meaning explicit? - One doesn't have to baseline the
definitions.

I imagine that a better reason (though not a good one) for
not making gismu definitions explicit is that it would take a lot
of work. But in this case I think it is preferable for LLG to
make a commitment to administer the gradual compilation of
prototype definitions, with the work undertaken by the
community. For example, Lojban list could debate the definition
of cukta, agree on one, and the LLG could then incorportate it
into the deluxe version of the dictionary.

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And