ago24 & replies

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

             Sorry about that last try; I am shifting computers and my
        Lojban files are on the other one from the modem.  When I try to
        do this stuff from memory, I get random products from four stages
        of Loglan, with '76 being the most likely.  Please relex and bear
        with me.
             That aside, the last exercise was to find plausible Lojban
        for "ago," "plausible" being defined as expressions that are true
        in the relevant situation and for which Griceans could find an
        acceptable explanation for the fact that the expression did carry
        the "ago" message, whatever its literal meaning was (I assume
        that Griecan pragmatics is not the Freudian psychology of lin-
        guistics, but that that some possible turns of phrase cannot be
        explained to carry some meanings). So far as the responses go, I
        see no evidence that the exercise was a failure.  All three of
        the expressions presented are demonstrably true in the situation
        in question and at least the first and second (with -mei and -moi
        -- correct places, too, please) are patterns which work in natu-
        ral languages and so, presumably, have good pragmatic explana-
        tions.
             The only criticisms are that the first confounds the origin
        and the magnitude of the displacement and that they are kludgy.
        Actually, the first uses a device for indicating an origin in
        order to specify an magnitude of displacement, a trick used in
        several natural languages.As some examples in another thread
        show, the differences between the types of arguments will usually
        sort matters out correctly. (And, incidentally, coming up with
        the same solution as Lojbab in Lojban is hardly a criticism or a
        grounds for dismissal.) As for being kludgy, they are a least
        meaningful Lojban and true, whereas the proposed alternative is
        questionable on both counts.  I am not sure what "a medium tempo-
        ral distance from the set of three years" means (if I understand
        _za_ correctly) and so am unsure that it is true of an event
        three years ago.  Now, of course, saying something obviously
        false or hopelessly unintelligible is one way to trigger conven-
        tional implicatures and so this barbarism may work and even work
        better than my versions.  But I do not see any evidence provided
        that it will.
             To be fair, the alternative proposed is not meant to mean
        "ago" in Lojban-as-of-now but is rather a proposal for a "small,
        cheap" change to Lojban-new-and-improved. One of the effects of
        living with an ancient cmavo list is that I regularly see how
        much has changed in the last several years. Some of these changes
        have no doubt been useful and needed. Some of them have arguably
        improved things somewhat (adding a place for the sequence to n-
        moi may be one of these, though, thinking back to the fight to
        get the origin added as a place, it does seem that the sequence
        probably is less often referred to and so should be the third
        place rather than the second -- I assume the origin is the third
        place, so "_befi la Cac_ to be on the safe side").  But a number
        of them seem to me to have been "small cheap" changes to solve
        problems for people unable -- or unwilling -- to solve them
        within the Lojban they were given.  And, since these problems
        tend to turn up randomly and piecemeal, these "solutions" have
        been inserted in the same way, often without regard for broader
        pictures. Now, I do not know what happened to change _zai_ from a
        tensor (presumably a metric on a vector, though the description
        is not very clear) to whatever it is now, but it seems to have
        been done without regard to the need for such tensors.  Similar-
        ly, the move from _ze'e_ meaning "during an indefinite (i.e., not
        specified as short, medium or long) interval" to (can this really
        be right?) "an infinite time interval" (when would we use that?)
        was not carefully planned (and it is hard to imagine what could
        have prompted it -- even if it turns out that I did it myself).
        Finally, some of the shifts seem just pointless, if not counter-
        productive. Some of the above may be of that sort, but the shift
        of _lo_broda_ from "all broda" to "some broda," both of which are
        redundant for Qda poi constructions and much less efficient in
        that role, strikes me as an especially clear case of change for
        change sake and without regard to further consequences.
             I am not sure that the proposed changes in _za zi zu_ (why
        all three, by the way?-- since the metric applied gives the more
        exact size) is as pointless as these or even that it reflects the
        frequent quick-fix-rather-than-working-in-the-system attitude
        that some changes surely have.  The claim that the set are not
        used (i.e., that no one has yet had occasion to use or, perhaps,
        has yet figured out how to use) shows at least some concern with
        the effects of such a shift, though the systemic ramifications
        have not been dealt with yet - what does this do for the set as
        tense affixes, for example, or for the meaning of other tense
        affixes that also serve as tags? Barring some clarification on
        those points, I would have to say that the proposal had not yet
        earned acceptance.
             (BTW, what is _bu'u_?  I still have it as a bound predicate
        variable, the only second order part of this system. In the same
        way, _ne'a_ is given as a non-restrictve relative clause giving
        membership in a set and _to'o_ is a toggle for print case on
        words.  Losing the last two does not seem a loss, assuming they
        went to a good cause, but the first one would cripple the logical
        nature of the language if it went completely.  Has it been re-
        placed?)

        Some Notes on Related Threads
        1. I see _xo'u_ is still alive.  Good! The move to the heqad of
        the highest prenex is simply the simplest rule and the one that
        seems to be involved most often in natural languages (besides,
        every Q is defined ultimately from its highest prenex position,
        so all we really affect is order here). If there are good reasons
        for a different view, we can still adjust (obviously, last in
        highest prenex is not useful, since that we can obtain in after-
        thought mode already).  Some of the comments on _xo'u_ seem to be
        more appropriate to whatever it is that marks terms in opaque
        contexts that can shine through the opacity and be taken to have
        external reference. Incidentally, most of the examples of _xo'u_
        are not from unlikely meanings but from cases of English "any,"
        which dfunctions in English in just the same way.
        2.  The use of _vi_ for "at" is already in Urloglan, c.1960, and
        probably is ineradicable.  Nor is getting rid of it necessarily
        desirable: "at" just is not a precise term at all and the dis-
        tinction between it and "right up close to" is not going to be
        more than one which varies with purposes.  See Mad Ludwig on
        "Stand just there."
        3.  The thing And wants for this sibling problem, one from column
        A and one from column J is a Cartesian product, for which we once
        had a cmavo in JOI, though I cannot now lex it.
        4.  I am not sure that a house can be NO color at all and it it
        is several different colors, they come down to a single JOI color
        combination, a suitable instantiation for _da_.  But some things
        can be no color, so that part doesn't count for _dakau_.  Of
        course, if x2 of _skari_ is a set, then even the 0 case works.
        Still, I find _makau_ and its ilk very crisp.
        5. If we are to have lambda variable, we need a slough of them,
        since the whole point of lambdacism is that different ones can be
        replaced differently.  In particular, _lo ka kea mamta kea_ is
        not the mother relation but the self-mother relation (one that
        rarely holds except for the odd goddess), since _kea_ must be
        replaced by the same term in all its occurrences on each applica-
        tion. (authoritative utterance of someone who studied the lambda
        calculus with Church his own self.)
        5.  Yes, functions are predicates, but special ones.  To be a
        function, a predicate has to verify the appropriate form of
        AxAyAz(Fxy & Fxz => y=z), i.e., that for every set of "arguments"
        the "value" is unique.  With that, you can use either notation to
        do mathematics.  But function notation is much simpler; compare
        (x+y)*z = (x*z)+(y*z) with (Sxyw & Pxzv & Pyzu => (Pwzx1 <=>
        Swvx1)).  Of course, allowing functions into the language as
        primitives opens the path for more quick ways to get undecidable
        sentences.