Re: opaque

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

pc:
> &:
> For shifts to other worlds, we need something in NAhE, as I've said
> before
> pc:
> NAhE has the wrong grammar for the present question, which is
> just about referential expressions in otherwise normal contexts.

But I think, and you maybe half-agree, that there are two questions
- (1) how to do opacity for things hunted and wanted, & (2) how to
shift world for things described by works of fiction (as in "I drew
a unicorn"). Our discussion has chiefly been about (1). It was for
(2) that I thought we need something in NAhE, but I can now see how
LAhE might be appropriate for (2).

> NAhE is useful for shifting the whole bridi into Nephalococcygia -

Nephelococcygia

> - although I would have thought that the home of the usual modals,
> CAhA, would do it even better.

I.e. for problem (2)? Maybe. Okay: should we propose that to CAhE we
add two cmavo for "true of the real world" and "true not necessarily
of the real world", with the former being the default?

> What we need for the present problem

Problem (1).

> is a sumti-to-sumti function that
> projects a new point of evaluation for the sumti inside, LAhE as ever
> was.
> &:
> I accept that in principle there could be a new addition to LAhE
> that means "the quantification on this sumti does not belong in the
> bridi the default rules would locate it in". This in effect is what
> Jorge proposed virtually at the start of the debate on "any" - I
> think he called it {xee}.
> pc:
> I guess we had to go through all this to get me to understand that
> that was the point, if it was -- I am not convinced, looking through
> the records of that year-and-some-long discussion.

{xee} meant "any old broda whatsoever", which I think amounts, in
effect, to the same thing as "the quantification on this sumti does
not belong in the bridi the default rules would locate it in".

I vaguely remember {xee} being in LE or PA, but LAhE is a better
selmao for it.

> We need (in the current depressing state of the language)

why depressing?

> some way to get opaque contexts on the surface so that we can go
> unicorn hunting and the LAhE solution seems to be the one that causes
> least hassle (except for my relearning cost -- and everyone else's
> when they start to see what follows).

You're probably right, but we ought to agree on what this new LAhE
would mean. We already agree that this new LAhE is not needed to
make the hitherto unsayable sayable [unlike the new CAhA, which
would make the unsayable sayable]; so by normal standards, the new
LAhE shouldn't be adopted, but your advocacy is given privileged
attention.

> But this is a very different (though related) problem from the "any"
> case, which was getting out of acknowledged opaque contexts with terms
> known to refer into the upper level world.

That's just one kind of afterthought scope marker, isn't it? I think
we should forget about those. Is there anything that can't be said
without it?

> (Most of the "any" problems seem to me to have arisen from the ongoing
> problem -- that will now get worse -- of failing to note opaque
> contexts when they occurred or were intended, using simple sumti when
> nu sumti were required in the old cases, now failing to mark opaque
> sumti when intended.)

This is not really a problem - it is a problem in that it is an easy
mistake for learner lojbanists to make, but that's not a problem with
lojban itself.

---
And