Re: zo djuno ce zo jetyju'o

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

>> 'djuno' means what the baseline says it does, i.e. what lojbab intended.
>
>This is surely the crux. Are we really going to have to interrogate
>Lojbab at inordinate length about the meaning of every gismu.

I hope not %^)

>And
>note that even the gismu that seem straightforward, e.g. djuno, can
>turn out not to be.

I cannot imagine any gismu LESS straightforward than djuno, given that it
has messed up more discussions of the nature of Lojban, and led to more
changes in the grammar than any other single construct or concept in the
language.  Given that philsophers have argued for centuries about what it
means to "know" soemthing (or the equivalent concept in other languages)
it seems that it is especially hard to pin down, even without the need to
invoke multiple epistemologies and multiple metaphsyics's.

I doubt that anyone would have to interrogate Lojbab about the meaning of
mlatu %^)

>> Why shackle ourselves with English semantics?  We should be striving to leav
>>  them behind.  If there is no need to define 'djuno' as English 'know', why
>>  it?
>
>This is the mabla anti-malglico attitude rife in Lojban. Just because
>English does things one way doesn't mean Lojban has to do them
>differently.

The anti malglico attitude stems from the recognition that so much of Lojban's
design was done by English speakers, and if we can ENVISION an alternative
to English's way of expressing things, we assume that any tendency to
choose the English-like way is reflecting our bias.  We are afraid that
failure to avoid such boas will lead to Lojban being merely a form of
ecncoded English which will have little use that English does not already have.
It would certainly reduce the potential for a Sapir/Whorf test (whereas
always avoiding the English formulation would not, since the bias that
results from any such decision is fairly random with regard to other languages)

Furthermore, ther eis additional bias in that many people who are English
speakers are drawn to Lojban because of the perceived illogicallity of English.
Therefore they presume that going outside of English norms allows them to
evaluate the logicality of their expression in itself, without the tendency to
be drawn towards or away from a particular persepctive by its resemblance to
a particular English formulation.

Nora and I run across similar problems in ourt studies of Russian.  The
Russian word for "find" looks like  a preposition-prefixed "upon-come"
i.e. "to come upon".  Clearly to come/go upon something does not
necessarily mean to "find" it, but it has somehow become embedded in
both lexicons (and perhaps is generally found in I-E languages, I don't know).
We groan when we find these, and are troubled because too many such
likenesses might lead us to  try to express other things in Russian
using what we perceive to be English idiomatics, and we are pretty sure this
would be wrong (and not understood).

With Lojban there are no native speakers to offend by such errors, and the
majority of Lojban students are native English speakers who might not detect
such idiomatic Englsih usage-translations, which would then infect and
perhaps become idiomatic in Lojban without conscious analysis.  It is useful
that the two most prolific Lojban writers these days are Jorge and Goran
who are not native English speakers and can be expected to hold our feet to
the fire on malglico usages.  But even they are fluent in English andare
native speakers of other I-E languages.  The real test of Lojban semantics
will be when we try to communicate with non-English speaking native CHinese
or Georgians or Thais using only Lojban.

>We just have two competing definitions of {djuno}. One, which is
>different from but akin to English "know", and which has been clearly
>--More--
>articulated, and the other which Lojbab has been striving to
>articulate with varying degrees of success.
>
>How do we choose between them? - e.g. if we are going to use {djuno},
>which meaning will we intend it to have? Do we just ask Lojbab to
>pronounce on the matter, and do our best to understand what his
>pronouncements mean, and just swallow and accept it if they turn out
>to be incoherent, or do we actually deliberate the issue, looking
>at the intrinsic sensicality of the candidate meanings, and their
>relationship to the meanings of other Lojban vocables?

Well, having delinerated on the issue, we can just leave it undecided,
with the discussion on the record and clear in everyone's minds, and maybe
add in the lujvo required to distinguish the other if one is chosen
(true-knolwedge and false-knowledge, if my version is chosen; no idea if
otherwise).  Actual Lojban usage will then tend to conform toone or the other
based on our perceptions of the merits of the cases.

I think that my version is a superset of the other version, a more general
form, and we have generally preferred to make gismu the most general yet sill
meaningful forms possible.

If Lojbab's pronouncements are incoherent, then people will use the language
in ways that they variously perceive lojbab's pronouncements.  When there is
miscommunication, meaning will be negotiated to form a new sense of the word
that will override Lojbab's pronouncements, since usage beats Lojbab in
any dispute.  But unless miscommunication occurs and is recognized, such
resolution by usage is rather difficult.  It will take a LOT of usage,
not usage intermediated by English, before most fundamental disputes of the
sort we are having dealing with generality of a gismu are going to be
resolved.

I would not expect that intelligent analysis of Lojban semantics as it
pertains to usage can be done without at least 5 years of solid usage history.

Unless usage rates pick up, I am sure it will take longer.  We need more than
Goran and Jorge writing in Lojban %^)  Arguing semantics in English may
resolve some issues to make people more confident int heir Lojban that they
know what they are saying, but I think that developing fluency in Lojban usage
will need to take precedence over developing semantic  consistency.  (And the
fluency itself will lead to som sort of semantic consistency simply because we
aren't going to reanalyze our use of djuno every time we use it).

>It's hard to cite without there being a reasonably comprehensive
>corpus. There has, though, been enough usage for one to get a sense
>of how people use certain words and grammatical features.

There is enoughg to get a sense as to how Jorge and Goran use some words and
features.  When we have 500 Jorges and Gorans and they all use the language
the same way, then I will agree that we can know how "people" usae the words
and features.  Not that Goran and Jorge are not persons, but the use of the
mass term suggest that we are dealing with a large enough mass that
individual idiosyncrasies are not to be suspected when we observe a pattern.

lojbab