Re: replies re. ka & mamta be ma

[jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU]

And:
> > > What I would claim is that if 2 lgs can express the same idea,
> > > but 1 lg takes 1 word to do so & the other takes 10000 words, then
> > That's why I think {kau} is important. The reformulation using
> > 10000 words just doesn't feel like the same idea.
> For most Q-kau, avoiding it costs an extra 4 words.

Did we reach an agreement on how to avoid it in general? Here are my
latest thoughts:

For the most common case, {makau}, what we mean by:

        ko'a djuno le du'u makau klama
        She knows who comes.

is something like:

        da poi sumti zo'u ko'a djuno le du'u la'e da klama
        There is a sumti such that she knows that the referent of
        that sumti comes.

So, {da} here is something like {lu le prenu li'u}, not {le prenu}.

This is necessary instead of a regular {da} because one possibility
is that she knows that noone comes. This also is the reason why {ma}
is preferred over {da}. {ma} is a place keeper for sumti, while
da is a place keeper for the referents of sumti. Just as in the
case of questions we ask our interlocutor to fill with the appropriate
sumti, here we claim that there is a _sumti_ that makes the statement
true, not a referent of da.

For uses of kau with other questions the rewording is not so simple
because we don't have the equivalent of {da} for other selmaho, except
possibly {bu'a}, which I won't attempt to use, but can probably be
helpful in rewording {mokau}. For {xokau} you proposed to use the
selbri "...is the cardinality of set...", (no existing lujvo that I
know) but the way I'd put it is this:

        ko'a djuno le du'u xokau prenu cu klama
        She knows how many people come.

        There is a <number> (i.e. a string of PAs) such that
        she knows that {<number>prenu cu klama} is true.

I wouldn't know how to write that in Lojban, because there is no PA
variable of the type of {da}. (I'm not sure if {mo'e da} would work,
it wouldn't seem to agree with the example in the gi'uste.)

In general, "...Q-kau..." can be reworded as "there is an <X>
with the same grammar of Q, such that  "...<X>..." is true.

Just as questions say "replace Q with appropriate thing of same
grammar so as to make the sentence true", indirect questions say
"there is an appropriate replacement for Q-kau that makes the
sentence true".

> To the miniscule extent that any of this discussion is relevant to
> Lojban, my point is that ease-of-use & flexibility justifications
> for some grammatical device should be distinguished from other
> justifications.

Not that I like to disagree, but I think there are no other
justifications. "Reflecting cognition" doesn't tell me anything.

> > > I'm not sure I understand. I'd have thought it is precisely
> > > semantics, & only semantics, that determines truth-conditionality.
> > Not always. {mi e do klama} is truth-conditionally equivalent to
> > {mi klama ije do klama}, but this is independent of the semantics.
> > They are sintactically truth-conditionally equivalent.
>
> We must understand different things by "syntax" and "semantics".
> The semanticosyntactic rules that derive duhu from seduhu yield the
> same duhu for the two sentences you cite. To see if the two
> seduhu are t.c. equivalent we examine the duhu derived from them.
> If you examine the duhu, the matter is semantic. If you examine
> the seduhu the matter is syntactic. This is semantic.

What I'm trying to say is this:

        <sumti1> A <sumti2> <selbri>

means the same as:

        <sumti1> <selbri> IJA <sumti2> <selbri>

for any <sumti1>, <sumti2>, and <selbri> and any corresponding A-JA pair.
I call that a syntactic rule, because it is independent of meaning.

The distinction with {mleca} and {se zmadu} is that to say that these
are equivalent, I need to examine the semantics. To say that "John
went to the party" and "the person sitting next to me went to the
party" are equivalent, I even need to examine the context. (And I
suppose you wouldn't want to reduce these last two truth-conditionally
equivalent ways of saying the same thing to one in the hypothetical
minimal language.)

> I assume that Lojban is supposed to translate in pred calc and that that
> is one of its guiding ideas. You can translate {pa} simply as "1", while
> in contrast, {Q-kau} translates in a much more complex way.

Does pred calc use numbers? I had the vague idea that they could be
expressed as existentials, but I may well be wrong. What about redundant
things like {ro} and {su'o}?

Jorge