Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

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

>> 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?

Would you like to judge for yourself?  I can forward some glossed text to you.
They have some l
logic types that apparently talk about the same kinds of
things that you do, though entirely behind the scenes.  But the actual
text generated tends to look like a parody of logic-talk, though sometimes
I admit to being forced into such hilarity by their lujvo-metaphors that
I have trouble seeing the logic past my laughter.

I can bundle up several texts with the glosses they provide, and let
you tale a look.  Though maybe you already are seeing it,s ince you
say thatthey are producing more text than we are in Lojban.  (Actually,
ONE PERSON is producing more text than we are, and so far as I know, no one
else in the entire TLI community is even trying.)

>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.

It is not that there is ambiguity.  Most idioms in English are not all that
 ambiguous, but merely make no particular sense in the context if taken
 literally.
I think that what I am calling "idiomatic" use of indirect questions for
non-subordinate interrogatives are misleading because they suggestthat there
really is a question when there is not - at most it is a structure that
reflects the speaker's lack of knowledge of the value of the sumti, or desire
to notexpress it at that point.  I am wary of having all the sorts of
things that English uses indirect questions for transferred into indirect
questions in LOjban, when there is no real question.  I am curious as to how
non-SAE languages deal with these things.  Robin and Veijo?  Are you reading
this?

>> 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
>>  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.

Only arguing based on what I have seen.  We have little in the way of large
texts in Lojban, but there is Saki's Open Window, Ivan's Story of the Stairs,
and Colin's Princess and the Pea besides Nick's and Jorge's writings.  The
first two predate kau.  Since Saki is a readily available text, perhaps you
can find indirect questions in it that were not translatedinto Lojban?
Or choose some other piece of prose literature and tell us how many
indirect questions there are in say 10 pages of text (which owuld encompass
a significant percentage of Lojban text if translated).

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