Re: Lojban ML: Syllogism and sophism

["Jorge J. Llambías" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

>>Lojban certainly has far less polysemy than English. And yet English
>>is as capable of disambiguation as is Lojban, isn't it?
>
>I'm not sure that it is, IF you require no use of human intelligence
>or experience to disambiguate the polysemy.  Every word or sentence in
>English ADDs to the ambiguities to be resolved.  It is only through common
>sense recognition of the overlaps of related semantic spaces that we know
>which meaning of each word applies.  I suspect that this is one of the
>hangups in AI.

You could prove your assertion very easily by giving an example
of something that can be said in Lojban and cannot be translated to
English to the same degree of unambiguity.

 >But I don't see what the difference is between a number on
>a scale and a measurement of a property using the units of said scale.

I don't either.

>5.3 on the scale of grams IS a measurement of the property/quantity of
>mass.

Right. Now, is {le ni} the measurement, or is it the property being
measured? Is it {le se merli} or {le te merli}?  According to example
5.3 of chapter 11 it is {le te merli}. According to example 5.5 it is
{le se merli}.

>> >As I have repeatedly said, my concept of slabu as age i slabu be loi
>>>jmive prenu.
>>
>>But "well known to some alive people" is not equivalent to old as age.
>
>"Known to the living" is how I would prefer to express it.  And a person's
>age is indeed how long s/he has been known to the living.

So someone who has lived for very long but is not known to anyone
living is not old? That's not what I understand by "old". And how come
{ni} would take the meaning of  "how long" here rather than "how much"?
Is {le ni marji} how long something has been material?

>Of course the
>stretch is harder when he talk about a rock sample being 4 billion years

It seems to me that you're trying to force it so that you can use "slabu"
for both meanings of English "old".

>"old" - that is not how long it has been known to the living, but rather
>how long it has been knowable to a potential observer.  Lojban can
>do wonders when you extend meanings to include potentials.

Yes, but I have trouble understanding why {le ni slabu} should be
understood as "how long something has been knowable" instead
of  "how much something is known/knowable". How did the time
dimension get into it?

co'o mi'e xorxes