Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

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

Lojbab:
> >> "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.

In "literature". You said "it just doesn't come up much in
literature".

> 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.

Kau hasn't been around all that long: I think I was around before
kau was. And it's easy to misanalyse a subordinate interrogative
clause as a free relative clause and so translate it as other
than an indirect question.

> 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.

It could not possibly be the latter. At the same time, it is hard
to imagine them not having got to grips with a way of rendering
indirect qs.

> >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.

One would more usually wish to assert that the truthval of a
proposition is fuzzy rather than talk about that fuzziness.
You could assert it using {jei}:  {la sort-of jei broda}.
But we might prefer to use {ja`a xi la sort-of broda}.

--And