Re: replies re. ka & mamta be ma

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

Jorge:
> > 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}.

More precisely, {da} is anything that refers to someone she knows went.

> 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.

Do you mean "sumti" in the syntactic sense? I think so. I don't
think you're on the right track, since direct or indirect interrogatoves
aren't asking about *words* (except for so-called echo questions -
"You ate a piece of WHAT?!").

To allow for knowing noone comes, I suggested:

   da zohu koha djuno le duhu da du lohi klama

If you reject this, I'll disagree with your rejection but I see
that all your claims about the crucial need for Q-kau follow from
the alternative q-kau-less reformulations you've offered.

> 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.

This is surely wrong if you mean sumti in the syntactic sense.
"Who went" doesn't ask "which words could replace 'who'?".

If you mean sumti in the semantic sense, I agree. Note that if
Tim and Tom went, then "she knows who went" entails that she knows
Tim went and she knows Tom went. But replacing "who" by Tom makes
the statement true. So your method may need refining.

> > 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 think that works. I don't think that your metalinguistic approach
captures the way we really understand indirect interrogatives, but
who cares.

> I wouldn't know how to write that in Lojban, because there is no PA
> variable of the type of {da}.

You don't want a PA variable. You want:
  da poi valsi [of selmaho PA] zohu koha djuno le duhu lahe
    the-sequence da followed-by zoi xi. prenu cu klama xi. is-the-case

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

Agreed. (At least for the time being.)

> 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".

I accept this is one way of describing what happens, but not necessarily
the optimal way. There are ways of doing semantics of all interrogatives
without invoking this notion of "appropriate replacement of same grammar".
Also, refer to my Tim/Tom reservation above.

> > 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.

What do you think of the lojbo notion of malglico? When you look at
Lojban do you see nothing but a language optimized for ease of use?
Or do you discern other criteria motivating its design? If you
do discern other criteria, do you think them mistaken?

> > > > 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.

It is a syntactic rule, but a wholly unnecessary one. It follows
from the necessary semanticosyntactic rules that say how sumti
coordination is interpreted. You need a rule saying how to interpret
{da a de broda} and a rule saying how to interpret {da broda ije
de broda}, and it so happens that those 2 mean the same. You don't
have to write a rule saying the 2 sentences mean the same thing.

However, I may have misunderstood the grammar of sumti coordination.
Perhaps it is genuinely treated as a syntactic abbreviation of the
sentence coordination, and there is no rule giving the meaning
of sumti coordination.

If this is the case, I would still dissent from:
> > > 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.

since I prefer to think of duhu and not seduhu as having truth
conditions.

> > 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}?

As far as I know (i.e. not very far), numbers aren't a type of their own.
But you could treat them as constants, of the same type as Jorge, Lojbab,
etc. {Suho} can't be treated that way: you could do {suho broda} thus:

   Ex set(x) Ey number(y) & not less-than(y,1) & cardinality(x,y)
     Az member(z,x) -> broda(z)

As for {ro}, if it is really and truly redundant, under all metaphysics,
then I suppose it's not there in the pred calc proposition derived  from
sentences.

--=
And