Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

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

> >> 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.

You said: most lojban text is translation, and indirect questions
don't come up much in literature. The only obvious implication
of that is that you were saying that most lojban text is
translated from foreign literature, in which indirect questions
do not occur very much. That implication is what I dispute.

> >> 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.
>
> 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).

Sometimes there is ambiguity and sometimes there isn't; only
some types of subordinate interrogatives are confusable with
free relatives. "I'll see what she saw" is ambiguous, but
"I'll see who she saw" isn't. Only very rarely is there ambiguity
in context, though.

> 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.

There are pitfalls, but these are potentially avoidable. Anyway,
I'm not aware of there being this kind of problem in the
refgram.

> >> 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.

It would be instructive to learn what they do. Do they generally
take logicosemantic issues less seriously and more fudgily?
(Try to be objective... I sometimes wonder whether TLI Loglan
gets traduced: although the lojbo community is much dynamicker
than the logli one, TLI Loglan looks nicer, and recently more
text is being produced in it than in Lojban.)

> >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.)

I had thought it was going to go into the refgram. My memory is
that at some point in the fuzzy debate John declared that this
would be the way to show fuzzy truth values. If it's not in the
refgram then I won't explain it.

--And