Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

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

>> "many people"?  I don't think "many people" have used EITHER le jei or
>> le du'u xukau.  Most people who have done stuff in the langauge have been
>> doing translations, and it just doesn't come up much in literature.
>
>I don't know how much is "much" in your judgement, but in my
>judgement indirect questions are very ordinary and commonplace.

In Lojban usage?  I am talking ONLY about what I have seen in the limited
amount of Lojban text.  Given that we have a way of expressing them that
is readily identifiable (use of kau) a large number of Lojbanists have
written things in the language and never used them.  So far as I know,
JCBs group has gone for 40+ years and not noticed the NEED to use them.
This could be logic errors on their part, or it could be that the types of
things that Lojbanists say/express more rarely invoke an indirect question.

>I agree it is not the type of thing that is
>> frequently needed, but then this is true of at leats half the cmavo.
>> Iff we ever return to fuzzy logic, jei will be more useful.
>
>I wouldn't have thought that would make it more useful. Tell us
>how it would.

I'd rather not.

It was intended that jei be used to talk about the truth value of a
proposition, which is generally expressed as "true" or "false" or "0"/"1".
My understanding is that fuzzy logic can also use values between 0 and 1
meaningfully.  Likewise probabilistic functions can use 0/1 scale of
truth value meaningfully.  We identified something meaningful that someone
at the time asked how to talk about, and it seemed more akin to an
abstraction than a standard selbri.  It is plausible that one could have
invented a gismu/lujvo involving du'u/sedu'u and a truth value, but at the
time we did not have du'u in the language yet - only nu, ka, and ni.

The concept remains useful for its original purpose, which is indeed
rather less rarely invoked in language than indirect questions.  But then
re'a matrix tramspose/dual is likely to be even more rarely used %^).

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab
    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";
    Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.