Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

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

>> 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".

So what is "literature" in Lojban.  At this point, it is anything
written, generally of longer than a single sentence, used to communicate
rather than as an example in argumentation.  I am not a snob that says that it
 has to be good to be literature.

>> Given that we have a way of expressing them that
>--More--
>> 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.


Which is what I said in my last post is idiomatic in English.  Indeed
I am not sure whether we can necessarily tell which English usages are
true subordinate interrogatoves (maybe we should use that phrase rather
than indirect question, since it sounds like to you it
represents the underlying semantics, whereas the indirect question is merely
the form it takes in English).

At which point it becomes difficult to interpret these kinds of things from
examples in the refgrammar that use colloquial English translations that may
not match your sense of semantic precision.

>> 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.

That is the case, as I understand it.  Perhaps sometime I will ask McIvor
(Cowan's parallel inthe TLI community, who is more sympathetic to us
than JCB is) to be sure.

>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}.

I vaguely recalll this ja'a xi stuff from the fuzzy logic discussion.
I have ni udea what it means.  It is not in the refgram.  (Please don't
explain, since I am spending too much time already and do not need another
thread.)

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