Re: Problems with Abstraction

[Gregory Higley <ghigley@EN.COM>]

Residents of Lojbanistan,

I looked at the relevant chapter -- 11 -- in the refgram, and it cleared
things up for me.  But I think the mistake I made was in looking at an
abstraction in isolation, without realizing that, in most usages, it would
be embedded in some way in a bridi, e.g.

la djan prami la djordj le ka la djein cu prami la djan
John exceeds George in the property-of Jane loves John

I realize that normally {la djan} would be omitted in the abstraction, but
this serves to illustrate what all of you realized and I was too dense to
catch.  Of course, it's possible to invent all kinds of sentences which
play havoc with {ka}, but of course, none of these are very useful for
communication ...

AS AN ASIDE ...

la djan prami la djordj le ka la djein cu prami la djosef

I decline to translate this, and I don't regard it as a defect of the
language.  It is possible in any language to create grammatical nonsense,
although the heights to which you can go with this are exceptional in
Lojban.

This is great.  Looking at the reference grammar has rekindled my interest
in Lojban.  I am still a bit critical of the language -- although next time
I'll be sure to look at the refgram before shooting my mouth off -- not in
terms of its structure as such, but in terms of how usable that structure
is by humans.  I think the vast majority of Lojban sentences can be
expressed without having to resort to the hideous, horrible, and anti-human
FA, but I still think that place-structures are largely unusable.  Oh,
well, that debate is as old as Loglan ...

At this point I'm rambling, so I'd best sign off for now ...

Gregory