Re: On logji lojbo discussions

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

Lojbab:
> >Right, but to actually get across the intended meaning, it should
> >have been
> >
> >  mi djuno lo du`u xu kau la frank cu bebna
>
> Or perhaps "mi djuno tu'a lejeikau la frank cu bebna"

Doubtful. IIRC {kau} is not well defined when not after a
Q-word. With a struggle I might make some sense of your example,
would it would take a lot of cerebration & conscious reasoning.

> >Had jei meant "whether" it would have been VERY useful.
> Since xukau and lejeikau exist this seems incorrect.

I don't know about lejeikau. Is this in the refgrammar somewhere.
I don't remember ever having seen it before.

As for xukau, this can serve for "whether", but "du`u xu kau"
is 3 syllables longer than "jei".

> It would be unique
> among indirect questions in not requiring indirect question marking.

I have shown that all indirect questions can be reduced without
longwindedness to formulae involving "whether". "Whether" itself
can then be further reduced, but only in a long-winded way.

> >(b) most users
> >realized that using "jei" to mean "whether" would be erroneous
> >(even though I am sure that "jei" was created with the intention
> >that it mean "whether"
>
> No, since I created it.  It was created specifically to talk about the truth
> of a proposition.

But I have seen from your own messages that you have believed that
to know the truth value of p is to know whether p is true.

> If I recall, cu'o was added to MOI early on as another way of dealing with
> fuzzy logic, since at that time I had the apparently mistaken assumption
> that fuzzy logic was akin to probability.  I am not all that sure that we will
> not find sufficient *linguistic* similarities to justify uniting expression
> of fuzzy logic and probability,

I am sure we will not.

> even though I have been told that they are
> totally unrelated.  But I was fixated at the time on the 0/1 truth functional
> scale which applies to both probability and some fuzzy logics.
>
> "whether" had certainly never been discussed, nor any other sort of indirect
> question.
>
> >Note that I do not then go on to advocate any change of the
> >baseline, or anything like that. Rather, I would like us to
> >discuss unresolved issues, and what the best resolution would
> >be, even though the results of the discussion are non-binding
> >(at least not until/unless usage entrenches them).
> >
> >Are you reassured by that? Are we moving towards agreement?
>
> I suggest that I will be reassured only when there is a mechanism, formal or
> informal  whereby when people think they are discussiong an unresolved
> problem, they document said problem at least to the level of Cowan's old
> change proposals before the discussion starts.  Let us agree that there is
> an unresolved problem before trying to resolve it, and then use the
> prewritten problem statement as a basis to track resolutions.  The "solution"
> wold have to be written up as a summary.  Since the bulk of such issues are
> semantics, I would prefer that discussions be marked "unresolved semantics
> issue #XXX: sumti raising" or something like thatm, and keeop all the
> issue descriptions on the ftp/web site with their eventual resolutions when
> decently sumarized.

I'll try to do something vaguely approximating to those stringent
requirements.

--And