Re: fuzzy bears

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

la stivn la and spuda di'e
> There is some ambiguity about what
>
><blabi cribe>
>
>means. This could perhaps be a polar bear or a bearish type of white, or a
>whitish type of bear, or many other things.

I agree it could be many things, but I don't think it can be a bearish type
of white. That would be {cribe blabi}.

>Isn't there also some ambiguity in what a
>
><lo vo cribe>
>
>is?

Not the same kind of ambiguity. That's "at least one of the "exactly four
things that are bears". There may be disagreement as to what exactly
counts as a bear, if that's what you mean, but that's already present
in {lo cribe}, so it doesn't have to do with tanru.

>Isn't this also a metaphor, just as a <blabi cribe> is a metaphor?
>If not, why not?

Well, neither is a metaphor in the English meaning of the word.
{blabi cribe} is a metaphor only in the Lojbanists' sense of
"metaphor". It is better to just call it a tanru. And {lo vo cribe} is not
a tanru.

>Can't apparently nonsensical, but grammatically correct
>lojban statements acquire meaning through conventional usage?

Yes, as long as people agree on the convention.

>Certainly a
><lo vo cribe> is different from a <vo lo cribe>.

Certainly. The first one is "at least one of the exactly four bears that
there are", and the second one is "exactly four of all the bears that
there are".

>>> <le so'a cribe pu finti le lisri>
>
>Perhaps you are misunderstanding my point. I fully understand that this is
>not a previously explored lojban utterance, and I acknowledge that it is
>perhaps nonsensical, given current usage. My question is whether or not
>these types of statements can acquire meaning (perhaps a fuzzy meaning) if
>they are:
>
>1. grammatically allowed

They are.

>2. don't overlap with the meanings of other concepts which would reasonably
>fill that semantic space

They don't always, but they do sometimes. {lo so'a cribe} wouldn't
overlap with anything because it doesn't mean anything. {so'a} is
necessarily a quantifier relative to a total such that it cannot be itself
the total, so it cannot go as an inner quantifier. But {lo so'u cribe}
already has meaning = "at least one of the few bears that there are".
With your proposal it could also mean "at least one of all the things
that are barely bearish" or something like that, which is a conflict of
meanings.

>3. are consistent with other acquired meanings

They are not. The inner quantifier is the number of things that
can truly fill that place. You want to use it to modify the selbri,
which is a different thing.

>> But
>>at any rate, <vofi'uze cribe> almost certainly means 4/7 of a
>>single bear.
>
>I don't think so. This is an indefinite description, no? Shouldn't it turn
>into: <vofi'uze lo ro cribe>? Isn't this currently nonsensical?

No, it's perfectly sensical. It means that of all the bears that there
are, you take 4/7 of one.

 >>There already exists a method of doing what you want, with ja`a xi,
>>and it has the virtue of not being limited to sumti, which your
>>proposal is.
>
>With time, Zipf would shorten this more precise fuzzifier, I would think
>(and thus there would be some ambiguity as to whether the shorter utterance
>was fuzzy or crisp). I do not see why my use of numbers could not be
>extended beyond sumti.

It can't be extended beyond sumti because {vofi'uze cribe} is itself
a sumti. This I think is unfortunate, I would have preferred that it be a
selbri, for example {re cribe} would mean "x1 is a pair of bears of
species/breed x2". But that's not how it is.

It could be turned into a selbri using {me}: {me vofi'uze cribe} does
mean "x1 is 4/7 of a single bear". Maybe that's what you meant.
But in any case, it doesn't mean "fuzzily 4/7 bear".


co'o mi'e xorxes