Re: cukta

[Nick NICHOLAS <nsn@vis.mu.oz.au>]

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Jorge Llambias jay'?
=la nitcion cusku di'e

=> 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 --

[Thanks to Lojbab for expanding on this. I would argue that le is much closer
to lo than to jei --- and of course, there is no easy way to convert {li
piso'e cu jei ti cukta} can be converted into a descriptor for {ti}
(corrections welcome!)]

=Can you use {le jei da broda} in a sentence? Besides the use as meaning
=something like {le du'u xukau da broda}, I haven't figured out how it
=can be used. Supposedly, it is a truth value, 0 or 1 or something in
=between, but how is it used? Does it work just like a number? What type
=of terbri can be filled with a {le jei ... } sumti?

I don't know if the gi'uste has massively changed in the past three years
while du'u has been gaining prominence; I don't think so. Nothing wrong
with, for example, {mi kucli lejei do jimpe loi kratymupli smuske} for
"I wonder whether you understand prototype semantics". {ledu'u} here would
mean something completely different --- more like metalinguistic commentary,
though at a semantic, rather than a syntactic level (=la'elu, not lu). I'd
be pretty sure {jei} is a decimal, yeah. I'm sure John's detailed this in
the ref.grammar.

=> 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.
=> What if it has only some? Like a CD ROM, or an empty book, or an Ionesco
=> work?

=No, no, no, you're mixing two different concepts. The CD ROM, the empty book,
=the object in which Ionesco's work is printed, are all objects that share
=some properties, and could all be encompassed by a generous word. The Ionesco
=work itself shares properties with the program stored in the CD ROM and with
=something you might write on the empty book.

So far so good. You've made it sound like Wittgenstein's family properties,
which is a good thing. (Family properties mean all members of a set share
some properties with some other member, but no properties are (necessarily)
shared by all the elements).

=In English, "book" is used for these two concepts: the Ionesco work and the
=bound pages in which it is printed. In lojban, these two concepts are
=related with the selbri {cukta}, one goes in the x1 and the other in the x2
=place.

Again, that's how English works, and how Lojban works, and that's fine,
although I'm not sure people won't start calling CD-ROMs 'books' soon.

=There's nothing wrong with extending the meaning from printed pages to other
=methods of recording, or from a written work to say, a story in pictures.
=But to use the same word for the two concepts just because English does it
=is a different matter.
=[...]
=if a word in English, like "book", has two different core meanings, let us
=not confuse them into one with the excuse of fuzzy logic.

Well, here's where I disagree. 'Book' in English is not polysemous. Polysemy
is when you have two semantically different meanings to a word --- like 'pie'
also meaning 'magpie' (I'm not sure whether polysemy includes "accidentally" =
"different etymology" in its definition.) What's happening with 'book' is a
single meaning being pragmatically extended thanks to association and
generalisation. This is no accident; and the people working in this field
would strongly contend that it is not an effect local to English, but that
*all* human languages extend their semantics in this way --- that these are
universal, cognitive processes at work.

(Sorry about the tirade, but this does look like my PhD topic). ;)

=> (metaphorically, we would say, although I'm being
=> persuaded over here at the Linguistics Institute that the mechanism is
=> primarily contextual association, and metaphor is a by-product.)
=In this case, I don't see any metaphors, rather container and contents are
=being described with the same word "book".

Exactly. It's not a metaphor at all. It's metonomy: association by coocurrence.
The contention Elizabeth Traugott was making at the Institute was that
semantic change occurs primarily by metonomy (people noting that two meanings
go together in text), rather than metaphor (people drawing analogies.)

I know it's an intolerable ambiguity, and I'm all with you on the 'cukta'
issue. In fact, I thought we all *had* agreed on Lojbab's later formulation.
(Go on, Lojbab. Slip the change in. The discussion was February, and I
thought we'd reached a conclusion at that time.) But... you know, this is
not just malglico. This is remnyra'a, and I'm not even convinced it's
malkemremnyra'a...

=> Which is what we are interested in Lojban for in the first place, I tend to
=> think...
=Is it? Maybe it's just for fun... :)

Well, that too... ;)

Nick.