Re: The design of Lojban

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

Jorge:
>And:
>>> Lojbab has said that he sometimes sees people as events, so
>>> event Lojbab may yet happen to defend it.  :)
>>I agree with Lojbab here (always surprises me when that happens).
>>To my mind, restricting a tersumti to a nu serves only to exclude
>>abstract objects like numbers, ka, du`u, and so on.
>
>Well, I may agree with you. I don't agree that you can have
>{le nu broda cu prenu} = "the event of brodaing is a person"
>or {lo prenu cu fasnu} = "some person happens".

I still say that you can have the latter, though I would translate it as
"Being a person happens" or "Having a personality happens" for the English
and it then makes more colloquial sense.  In Lojban terms, we might prefer
lonu da prenu cu fasnu to lo prenu cu fasnu, but I think they mean
essentially the same thing.

For the other example, if a  computer exhibits apparent personality in
pseudodialog (as with Eliza program), we might say "le nu le skami cu gasnu
la elaizys. cu prenu".  It seems to me that le prenu is anything that
exhibits lenu ce'u ckaji le ka ce'u prenu  (hop I am using ce'u corerectly
here,though perhaps I need subscripts).

The requirement for all this to make sense is to take a "long view" such that
we see the entirety of a person's life or of the behavior of a computer as a
person, as an "event" interpetable per one or more of the event contours
(activity, process, point event or state).  When we talk of a person's life
as being "a flash in the pan" in some long view of things, we are clearly
seeing that person as a point-event.  Human beings don't normally think
of human lives as being on a scale suitable for "events".  On the other hand
"light" is nothing more than the manfiestation of quantum events is easily
seen as a non-abstraction.  Likewise the various subatomic particles.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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