Re: Dvorak (& Lojban)

["Lee Daniel Crocker (none)" <lcrocker@MERCURY.COLOSSUS.NET>]

> >The same happens with "longer". Can you say that one
> >thing is longer than another when you wouldn't say that
> >either of them is long? In English, yes. In Lojban, you
> >shouldn't use {clani} to translate "longer". We should
> >rather use tremau: zmadu fi le ka mitre.
>
> I'm not quite managing to keep up with the discussion in real time, but
> spotting this, I see a key point.  "tremau" to me isn't zmadu fi le ka mitre
> which I would take as being "more displaying the property of being measured
> in mitres" or thus "more measureable in mitres" - probably true of things
> at the macro level than of interstellar distances or atomic ones, and of
> course more  true of daistances than weights.  tremau in not "longer".
> clanymau should be "longer", and we then beg the question of ni because
> we disagree whether it is "zmadu fi le ni/ka clani".

If what we're trying to translate here is the meaning "of greater
magnitude in one physical dimension" (colloquially "longer"), then I
have to go with {tremau}, not {clanymau}.  {clanymau} also maps to
the English word "longer", but with the a different meaning--which is
not very lojbanic: greater in the degree of being subjectively "long"
in a certain context, which has the same lack of precision as {melbi}.

The "more measurable in meters" concept you list above is a meaning
that makes sense, but isn't very useful.  It makes far more sense to
me to use /all/ the measurement words like {mitre} in a consistent
and simple way, to have meanings not specifically tied to their units
when abstracted.  After all, isn't that what the cognitive process of
"abstraction" is, to omit specific referents and measurements?  The
fact that the unit defaults to meters should really be irrelevant to
its deeper meaning--it's just a convenience.

Secondly, let me retract part of my earlier statement about {clani}.
{le na clani} doesn't actually fail to have {ni clani} (in the same
context, as Jorge correctly emphasizes), it just has a {ni clani} of
zero, which is as valid a quantity as any other, while it /does/
fail to have {ka clani}.  Here I depart from Jorge a bit: something
that is {na blabi} has no {ka blabi}, but it /does/ have {ni blabi}
of zero.  That helps the case where you're comparing two things.

Like the word "longer", the word "length" also has several meanings.
One of them is the abstract property of measurability in a certain
spatial dimension--{ka mitre}--a property of matter, that it takes
up space.  Electrons and baseballs have {ka mitre}.  Things like,
say, the company I work for, do not (though the building we're in
does).  My company may not have the property of length, but it might
have the property of duration (having been founded on a certain date),
and the property of wealth.

Another meaning of "length" is the specific amount of space a thing
takes up--{ni mitre}.  The only distinction I can see between {se
mitre} and {ni mitre} is that {se mitre} seems to imply a specific
referent, while {ni mitre} does not.  One can think of "3 meters"
as {ni mitre li ci} without any specific 3-meter-long thing involved.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC