Re: Lojban ML: Syllogism and sophism

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

>> >The scale necessarily provides the units.
>>
>>But your examples provided earlier in the message gave no indication of
>>the scale in terms that would provide units.  Example:
>>> >>    le nu ko'a sutra le nu broda cu cenba [le ka ce'u klani li xokau]
>>>>>    Koha's speed at brodaing varies [in how much it is].
>>
>>How does one know even that this is speed rather than acceleration, much
>>less whether it is kilometers/hour, meters/second**2 or furlongs/fortnight?
>
>One doesn't know. The scale there is zo'e (x3 of klani) so unless we
>are given more context, we can't tell. Your {le ni ko'a sutra le nu broda
>cu cenba} is not more specifc about the scale, is it?

Mine did not provide the units, but ni sutra is a speed/velocity and not
an acceleraion or other measurement.

>>le parbi be leni leni sutra cu cenba ku le temci
>--More--
>
>[You're missing {bei} there.]
>
>Why {le temci} and not {le ni temci}?

Off the cuff decision without a lot of thought.  I'm not sure whether an
 interval is a quantity or not.  Probably not given your questioning of it.
 Remember
that I do not habitually look things up, but try to maintain my Lojban usage
(such as it is) on long-ago memorized gismu lists.  When I do look things up,
it is a brief check and not a careful analysis of the place strutures.

>Is {le ni cenba} different from {le te cenba}?

Probably not.  See my immediately preceding comment.

>And you didn't explain what was {le se cenba} there.

well, amounts are numbers, so they change in value. leka namcu, perhaps.

>Before tackling acceleration we should know how to deal with
>velocity, and before that with displacement. For displacement
>we can use ve muvdu:
>
>            le ve muvdu cu mitre li bi
>            The path is 8 in meters.

OK

>            le ve muvdu cu klani li bi le ka mitre
>            The path is quantified as 8 in meters.

A path is not a quantity.  It can be measured in some property to be a quantity
but it is not itself a quantity.
>Or even:
>
>            le muvdu cu klani li bi le ka le ve muvdu cu mitre
>            The mover is quantified as 8 in the meters of its path.

Likewise moving things are not quantities.  You have an odd (to me) sense of
what a quantity is.  (Now I admit that if you were to redefine klani, as I
challeneged you to do, then you could make the x1 of klani into a thing that
is measureable, but then you have to change the wording.)

>            le ni la djan cu jmive cu klani li pamu le si'o nanca
>            The amount of John's living is 15 in a scale of years.
>
>But I don't understand why {si'o} is any better than {ka}.
>Is {si'o} really usable for dyadic relationships?

Probably it is more conventional than mandatory.  The scale is characterized
as an idea and not in terms of the properties of its units.  I am also
ever wary of using ka around you since you seem to want to put a ce'u in
there all the time or a xokau or some other stuff that I cannot often
understand.

>>??? le gugde cu klani li ciciki'oki'o leka le turni cu kancu le .y. .y.
>>ni le prenu cu xabju vo'a
>
>        le ka le turni cu kancu lei xabju be ce'uxipa ce'uxire
>
>>or maybe le cmima be le'i xabju be co'a
>
>I don't think you can replace {ce'u} with {vo'a}

I don't use ce'u unless it is clear that I must.  They are inhabitants of le
gugde, and I was repeating that sumti by reference.

>> A country is not a quantity.  You seem
>>to be making mincemeat of the concepts of quantity and scale.
>
>Not anymore than in the case of mitre, grake, etc. In English,
>we say that the length of an object is x meters. In Lojban, we
>simply relate the object with the number of meters. Same for all
>quantities. The object (or event) is related with the number
>that is a measurement of it in some scale.

But the wording of the place structure of mitre etc. specifically indicates
thatthe x1 is being measured.  Thius is not the wording of klani.  You who
argued djuno largely on the strength of a particular interpretation of what
my wording had to mean are introducing a meaning not suggested by the word
"quantity".

>I am not very happy though with the lujvo that I used above for "x1 is x2 in
>meters per second", mainly because it's not easily generalized to
>get  "x1 is x2 in meters per second squared" for example. Anyone
>has any ideas how to make such lujvo?

It was my intent in ages past to make the lujvo for all units that are based on
the standard metric units based on a lujvo for the concept being measured
followed by gradu.  This by convention.  It probably cannot be made to fit the
lujvo-making place structure rules.  For non standard units, I would
probably then prepend the altered component units.
jmagutci-<acceleration>-gradu -> ft/sec**2

Athelstan and I tackled lots of problems of this sort in concocting the gismu
list.  We had to have a workable proposal for a lujvo for almost any concept
that we could think of, and I have a couple of hundred pages in my file
of ideas that we actuakly wrote down (and we wrote down but a small fraction
of the ones we contemplated).  But all this was when lujvo-making was
intended to be far more adhoc than people turned out to prefer, so many of the
ideas will not work under the Ch 12 rules.  Someday maybe I or someone else
can go through them.  (But not till we get people to analyze the ones
actually apearing in Lojban text online - alist that probably grows by hundreds
or thousands per year).

lojbab