Re: TECH: new cmavo "ju'e"

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

John missed one of my arguments regarding "stag bo" in after thought.
Currently causal connectives are expressed using "A stag bo" or "JA stag bo"
or "GIhA stag bo" etc. in order to clearly specify the scope of the
afterthought.  It is a fundamental design principle in Lo??an that such
scope be absolutely unambigous, with the umpteen possible variable-scope
endings of "John went to the window and ..." each reflected in a clearly
different way.

AS disucssed in another thread, JOI has represented a slight muddying of this
design principle, since it has the grammar collectively of two differently
scoped logical connectives, E and JE, in order to save cmavo in an ill-defined
set of connectives that could be open-ended.  In explicitly non-logical
circumstances, a little smudging of the rules seemed OK.  BUt people have
of late been finding more and more uses for non-logical connectives, some
of which are not necessarily quite without logical import.

But giving JOI this broad grammar had a price, partly in terms of complexities
in elidable terminators, and partly in terms of significantly increasing
the overall complexity of the grammar.  Put simply - I don't LIKE the grammar
of JOI, and consider it non-Lojbanic, but accepted it as a price that had to
be paid to keep from having a separare set of JOIKs for each of the different
logical scopes.  Even WITH the current design, there are no JOIK equivalents
for GUhEks and GIhEks (fortethought tanru and bridi-tail connection).

The complex grammar of JOI makes errors in use and resulting scope likely
unless the proper terminators are used.  At least, with the limited
set of JOI members, though, the listener can be warned that the speaker is
treading on dangerous ground, allowing for some quick analysis and a
requesto for error correction.

The proposed usage of stag or stag-BO as a connective, without a preposed
connective scope marker, would add an infinite set of cmavo-compounds to JOI,
and they would be difficult to resolve on the fly since they make use of
the BAI words that already have two other usages with different scopes
(sumti tcita and selbri inflection).

Just as Jorge's proposal to allow JE the full range of usage of JOI is
unacceptable then, so is a major increase of JOI-scoped connectives,
especially since there already IS a means to connect using causals or other
BAIs in after thought:  we insert the BAI/stag in between a connective
of the right scope and BO/KE.

I would normally have done this using ".e ri'a bo", but Cowan convinced me last
night that using a specifica logical connective like ".e" is logically
risky - a causal does not necessarily want to claim ".e" truth conditions.
One could decide on a specific and appropriate logical connective that HAS
the desired truth table (perhaps a conditional), but the analysis might be
different for different contexts.  Ideally, what we need is a non-specific
LOGICAL connective for each of the different scopes.  Using JOI, with its
overstretched scope rules is dangeorous and confusing, ESPECIALLY when the
problem being posed is specifically one of scope.

But adding a non-specific logical connective to each connective selma'o is
impractical - we don't have a lot of cmavo free, and the logical connective
paradigms are in a pattern that has no room for expansion.

I am thus RELUCTANTLY conceding to John's proposal for ju'e BECAUSE it makes
no grammar change and uses only one cmavo, and more so, because it preserves
the existing principle of clear scope marking in afterthought connection.
Thta it has the side benefit of allowing Veijo's sentence compression makes
it a little more palatable.  Myself - I'll try to figure out and put in the
appropriate logical connective for each usage.

I will note that the proposal is NOT a complete solution in any case, either
for Veijo's compression or the causal problem in general.  There is no JOI
construct as counterpart to GIhEKs and GUhEks, and you cannot compress some
constructs where the logical connectives are analyzed in the lexer/compounder.
(e.g. you cannot compress constructs that would require other than "simple
--- sorry, I mean you cannot compress constructs that ONLY can be expressed
using a non-simple JOIKJEK as defined in the YACC grammar).

Since GIhEks and GUhEks are both candidates for causal connection, and for
 compression, a JOI-based solution is only a partial one.  But it will have to
 do.
The only other solutions I can thing of would be to extend into the now
experimental CVVV cmavo space (perhaps using gi'e'i gu'e'i ji'i'i and je'i'i
for non specific connectives in GIhA GUhA A and JA respectively), and
that also is something i am reluctant to do before the 5 year baseline - it
may be the proper long term solution though.

But at least ju'e, by being explicitly a memberof JOI preserves the pricniple
of explicitly marking connective scope with one of a small set of cmavo.

lojbab