Re: Digest Number 217

Yeah. Back to answering digests.

On Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, at 00:41 Australia/Melbourne, 
[email protected] wrote:

> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2003 15:55:32 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Invent Yourself <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Re: Gadri for you
>
> On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Nick Nicholas wrote:
>
> Bravo! A tour de force which gives us hope that we really do have the
> intellectual firepower (specifically, le ka ce'u galfi ju jai gau 
> stika)
> on board to bring this language to a superior resolution!

Would that I felt as optimistic...

> We've switched sides -- as is our wont -- and now I am promoting a 
> scheme
> on the strength of its being less damaging to the corpus! Your scheme 
> does
> involve some minimal reassignment. (lu'o refers to the confusion that 
> is
> "mass" just as much as does loi.)

But unlike loi, lu'o has seen much less usage, so its reassignment is 
safer. At any rate, an ambiguous lu'o with specialised LAhE for stuff 
and collective is something I could live with. Of course there is an 
alternative for collective: lo za'u lo broda , which is grammatical. 
Perhaps we can use that instead of LAhE as an unambiguous collective 
signal.

> A LAhE DOES seem like the best option for signalling de re/de dicto. 
> Also,
> this is somewhat orthogonal to the rest of the gadri.

There is definitely the whiff of {la'e lu'e} about de dicto, so I agree.

> However, in
> disambiguating loi and lo'e, these are pure gadri which never before
> needed any LAhE, and, these are cases of honest conflation and not the
> lack of a parallel or orthogonal structure. Therefore I still advocate 
> the
> fractionation of loi and lo'e, and will adjust my scheme to co-opt your
> results.

*shrug*. We'll see. I think maintaining the present conflation of loi 
is indispensable for any proposal that will be acceptable to the 
masses, but that's my opinion.

> Message: 9
> Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2003 19:33:28 -0400
> From: John Cowan <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Re: essentials of a gadri system
>
> Nick Nicholas scripsit:
>
>> Accepted. For my part, I have put my contribution on wiki, at
>> http://www.lojban.org/wiki/index.php/gadri%20report%2C%20aug%202003
>
> A few notes:
>
> 1) It's not really true that "There exists an X" implies that X is
> namable. The number of real numbers, still more the number of
> real functions of a single variable, vastly outruns the number of
> names. This doesn't really affect your argument.

"Name" is just an illustration of... uh, what is it, quiddity? You know 
better than me. At any rate, I'm adding a proviso; to make quiddity (or 
haeccity, I no longer remember the distinction :-( ) intelligible, it's 
as good an illutstration as any.

> 2) Grammatically, LAhE3 can't be a LAhE, since those (like any other
> sumti) can be quantified. We need a new selma'o and a new grammar
> rule if you *really* want unquantifiables.

Disruption to grammar should be minimised if this will pass. We are not 
used to seeing quantifiers on LAhE, the way we are on sumti. I would be 
contented to have the quantifier on LAhE3 be semantically ill-defined, 
rather than invent a new selma'o to have it also be syntactically 
ill-defined. If you, however, are willing to lend support to a new 
selma'o that excludes quantification, and if this does not backfire as 
perceived tinkering but is generally acceptable, I certainly have no 
objection to a syntactically unquantifiable LAhE. In all other regards, 
I do want this to be like LAhE though: it makes sense to speak of LAhE3 
ci lo mikce (Mr Three Doctors).

But I gotta ask: have outer quantifiers ever been an issue for li? For 
la'e? I know And wanted a Unique quantifier (currently tu'o) to seal up 
the quantification of such gadri, but I cannot see why the default for 
them would be anything but tu'o anyway.

> 3) I suggest that the "I fear" example be changed to "Joey fears"
> forthwith, because first-person is nothing but a snare in these
> examples. It's rational for me to say "Joey fears the OBM" even
> though I deny the OBM's existence. A fortiori, the other examples 
> should be
> changed as well.

Done.

> Message: 10
> Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2003 17:43:11 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000-/[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Re: essentials of a gadri system
>
>
> la nitcion cusku di'e

Jorge, John and And have reproached you more civilly on lo'e than I can 
hope to. I don't care that you're used to using lo'e as a generic 
rather than how it has been officially defined by the LLG for years; if 
anything, I take a particular delight in combating such humpty 
dumptying. My recollection is that when I showed that the Generic needs 
to be orthogonal to ontological type, you went through all sorts of 
gematriya to hang on to just lo'e as an all purpose generic. I'll have 
no truck with it.

That there's usage of generic lo'e doesn't sway me either: as we've 
been saying all along, gadri have been so ill-understood and anglicised 
by Lojbanists that usage counts for little, and what can be made sense 
of in extant prescription (which mandates the collective/stuff 
conflation, before anyone brings that up) counts for all the more. All 
that past usage of Generic lo'e tells me is that there is a need for a 
Generic gadri vel sim., and lo'e looked available. That does not annul 
CLL-lo'e, because it does not prove CLL-lo'e is broken. You can keep 
hoping that the criteria for fixing are broadened beyond brokenness to 
elegance, and I will keep saying that you will never be granted that 
with this community of Lojbanists. You will never be granted it by me. 
We're dealing with reality here.

>> lo'e makes
>> claims that are generic and intrinsic to the referent, i.e. "Lions 
>> live
>> in Africa"; but claims that are not an intrinsic property of the 
>> referent
>> should be made with "Mr" instead. "Lions live in Africa" is a claim in
>> some way definitional of lions, or at least characteristic of them. "I
>> like lions", or "I study lions", is not. Even though the referent is 
>> in
>> a sense the same --- Lion-kind --- I think it dangerous to conflate 
>> the
>> two kinds of claim. The syntax of the predications involved --- x1 vs 
>> x2
>> position of lo'e --- might seem a way out of this; but of course that
>> is untenable in Lojban: lo'e cifno cu citka lo'e mirlrantelope is a
>> claim characteristic of both lion and antelope.
>
> How is that property intrinsic? If lions became extinct, then antelopes
> would no longer be eaten by lions. Would that mean that they are no
> longer antelopes?

Intrinsic was misspoken for characteristic. I was thinking of the fact 
that "I study lions" cannot be a property characteristic of lions, and 
definitional of a prototype model of lions.

> Message: 11
> Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2003 22:35:05 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Invent Yourself <[email protected]>
> Subject: lo and intension (was: essentials of a gadri system)
>
> On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Nick Nicholas wrote:
>
>>
>>> Message: 1
>>> Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2003 14:41:56 +0100
>>> From: "And Rosta" <[email protected]>
>>> Subject: essentials of a gadri system
>>>
>>> As a contribution to the discussion, I thought I'd sketch
>>> what I think the essentials of a gadri system would be. I
>>> am ignoring both the current system, and the question of
>>> how to express these essentials verbally.
>>
>> Accepted. For my part, I have put my contribution on wiki, at
>> http://www.lojban.org/wiki/index.php/gadri%20report%2C%20aug%202003
>
>
> In your definitions of intension and extension, where does specificity
> enter in? lo mikce is by definition "nonspecific", making it 
> intensional,
> yet it's defined as "da poi broda", which by your explanation is the
> archetype of extension!

I think I've just realised why we never agreed on lo != any. 
Extensional can still be non-specific. In "I saw a doctor", you don't 
have a name for the doctor in mind, so they aren't specific. But you 
could meaningfully attach a name to them --- interpret the sentence 
with a specific reference --- and it would be meaningful; model 
theoretical semantics works on that very premiss --- you interpret 
non-specific sentences like "I saw a doctor" by enumerating the 
possible assignments of a specific value to the referent. In 
intensional contexts, by contrast, there can be no specific referent 
plugged in without changing the semantic completely. "I saw Dr Fred" is 
a subset of "I saw a doctor"; "I looked for Dr Fred" is not a subset of 
"I looked for a doctor, any doctor".

> Message: 12
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 12:57:34 +0100
> From: "And Rosta" <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: essentials of a gadri system
>
> John:
>> And Rosta scripsit:
>>
>>> 4. Named Collective. The Collective is identified by name
>>> (cmene). Plus optional noi- and voi-statements (of cardinality
>>> and/or Superset).
>> Is this like "The Smiths", the rock group whose members are not named
>> "Smith", or is this like "the Smiths", a family all of whom are named
>> "Smith"? I.e. I don't know what "identified by name" means.
>
> It is like the rock group. The plural morpheme in the example is a
> distractor. "Fleetwood Mac" would also be an example of (4), as would
> "John Cowan".
> The proposals treat individuals as singleton collectives. Things don't
> have to be done thus, but doing them that way leads to a more minimal
> inventory of primitives.

Right. I revert back to saying that the BPFK can't consider redoing 
gadri from scratch. And CLL p. 124 explicitly rules that lai means the 
latter -- which precludes the kind of bootstrapping And would prefer. 
So The Smiths may be loi prenu, but it's la smits., just as it is lo 
bende, right?

> Message: 13
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 05:47:47 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000-/[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Re: essentials of a gadri system
>
>
> la nitcion cusku di'e
>
>>> 5. Is-a-Subkind-of. Binary predicate taking Kind as one argument.
>>
>> This is not even a cmavo change (although it could be done with a 
>> cmavo
>> predicate), and I have no objection to it.
>
> What is a 'cmavo predicate'? Something in GOhA?

As And said, I had MOI in mind.

>>> 6. Subset-of: "is n% of" (= "contains x out of every y members
>>> of"), where n can be left vague and have the meaning "is a subset
>>> of". Binary predicates taking 1-4 as one argument.
>>
>> This can be either a tweak to ce'i, or a related MEI cmavo, possibly
>> with two numeric arguments, probably not (fractions should do).
>
> Isn't {si'e} for that? {zemuce'isi'e} seems to be "x1 is 75% of x2".

Yes.

>>> 7. Each-member-of. -- Distributivizer. Applies to 1-4.
>>
>> Either this is lu'i, or lu'i converts its referents a single
>> invididual, whereupon we would likely use a different LAhE.
>
> I hope you meant {lu'a}.

Yes.

> Message: 14
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 09:22:20 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Invent Yourself <[email protected]>
> Subject: No static, democratic (was: essentials of a gadri system)
>
> The attribute that distinguishes collectives from pluralities is that a
> collective has at least one interesting emergent property, which the
> speaker is considering. The null property of belonging to a plurality 
> is
> unhelpful and should not be considered. (Flames piped to /dev/grice.) I
> mean instead something like the ability to carry a piano.
>
> As Nick as alluded, de-emphasis of this point is what has seduced so 
> many
> otherwise virtuous lojbanists into using mass gadri simply for plurals.
>
> Nick, please think about adding this point to your wiki exposition.

Done, briefly. I ruminated on this much more in the ontologies; it 
doesn't really belong in this exposition, because its point was to 
differentiate loi-collective from loi-stuff rather than from 
lo-individual. But obviously any complete proposal needs to be explicit 
about emergence.

> Message: 15
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 07:04:06 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000-/[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: No static, democratic (was: essentials of a gadri system)
>
> But what And was positing here was to consider the collective
> as more basic than the plurality, so one would use collective always
> unless you want to emphasize distributiveness. He would use collective
> gadri even in the case of a singleton.

Understood. And that's why his proposal is Excellent --- and 
incompatible with Lojban as we know it.

> It should ceratinly be pointed out that the members of a set have
> some properties that apply only to the members one by one, some
> properties that apply only to the members as a whole, and some
> properties that fall in both camps. I don't think we need to regulate
> how to talk about properties that fall in the third category, given
> that we are forced to make a choice of talking of them as group or
> as individual properties.

I agree that if a property is attributable to both the individuals and 
the collective, we need not pick one or the other. I don't see the 
number of such properties being all that big, though I have a nasty 
suspicion you'll pull some horrid example out...

> Message: 16
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 15:02:27 +0100
> From: "And Rosta" <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Re: essentials of a gadri system
>
> Nick:
>> Accepted. For my part, I have put my contribution on wiki, at
>> http://www.lojban.org/wiki/index.php/gadri%20report%2C%20aug%202003
>
> We need to know what the inner and outer quantifiers are with the
> gadri and LAhE (and what the 'quantifiers' mean in those contexts).
> Until then, I can't really evaluate the proposal. I am eager to,
> but it is currently too underspecified.

I don't see what's to specify. LAhE1 pisu'o loi ro remna = some human 
sludge; LAhE2 pisu'o loi ro remna = a crowd. Both, I guess, admit to 
outer quantifiers counting clumps. Neither admits of an inner integer 
quantifier.

> I will say, tho, that "LAhE3 su'o lo" will not work. Perhaps "LAhE3
> tu'o lo" would work, but that raises the question of what "tu'o lo"
> means.

Why? After all, there is no extensional prenex requirement on the 
referent of LAhE: lo pavyseljirna is non-existent and cannot enter a 
prenex, but lu'e lo pavyseljirna does exist. So does lu'e ci lo 
pavyseljirna. If lu'e ci lo pavyseljirna is harmless for "three tokens 
of 'unicorn' ", why is LAhE3 ci lo pavyseljirna problematic for The 
Kind Of Three Unicorns, otherwise known as LAhE3 lo pavyseljirna cimei 
, and the proper expression for "I'm looking for three doctors"? (And 
looking for 3 unicorns, modulo reification: LAhE3 ci se ka 
pavyseljirna, perhaps.

> Message: 17
> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 15:28:26 +0100
> From: "And Rosta" <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Re: essentials of a gadri system
>
> For any property there is a Kind, that is all. In an ideal world, it
> would be as easy to talk about the Kind that embodies that property
> as about "da" that has the property and "it" that has the property.

The million dollar question, whether {lo se ka} will do it.

>>> 4. Named Collective. The Collective is identified by name
>>> (cmene). Plus optional noi- and voi-statements (of cardinality
>>> and/or Superset).
>>
>> I assume these are (if I can use for now my favoured LAhE-based
>> solution) LAhE2 ro lo broda, LAhE2 ny lo broda, LAhE2 la broda).
>
> Perhaps: tu'o LAhE2 ro lo broda, tu'o LAhE2 ny lo broda, tu'o
> LAhE2 ro la broda.

I know that LAhE1,2,3 could all end up in a new cmavo that doesn't 
admit outer quantifiers, but why do you rule out outer quantifiers of 
collectives? You can have two groups called The Smiths.

>>> 5. Is-a-Subkind-of. Binary predicate taking Kind as one argument.
>>
>> This is not even a cmavo change (although it could be done with a 
>> cmavo
>> predicate), and I have no objection to it.
>
> We should take it as a given that almost everything can be expressed by
> means of full brivla. The utilitarian dimension to the gadri system
> involves deciding where to add shortcuts.
>
> In my analysis, "This branch resembles two snakes" is "two subtypes of
> Mr Snake", & my judgement is that this is a sufficiently ordinary thing
> to want to say that it warrants having a shortcut to say it. In saying
> this in a Lojban forum, I am bearing in mind the entire weight of usage
> to date, which shows that all users prefer inexactitude to 
> longwindedness,
> but that Lojbanists do make an effort to learn the ready-packaged 
> devices
> the grammar provides for them. In other words, if the grammar provides
> a succinct way to say "two subtypes of", then Lojbanists will learn and
> use it. If the grammar doesn't, then Lojbanists will just say "two
> snakes" & not worry about saying what they don't mean.

I'm going to need many more examples than the bifurcated snakes to 
convince myself, let alone others, that this needs a cmavo. If you 
convince me, though, sure, that's a job for LAhE (this time with an 
outer quantifier) too.

>>> 6. Subset-of: "is n% of" (= "contains x out of every y members
>>> of"), where n can be left vague and have the meaning "is a subset
>>> of". Binary predicates taking 1-4 as one argument.
>>
>> This can be either a tweak to ce'i, or a related MEI cmavo, possibly
>> with two numeric arguments, probably not (fractions should do).
>
> And where does that leave piPA, so'e, "re le ci", & other forms that
> belong in the paradigm of (6)?

I'm obviously obtuse here. How are they not merely piPAsi'e, 
piso'esi'e, refi'ucisi'e...?

> We'd also need a de-broken form of MEI.

Remind me how it's broken again.

>>> 7. Each-member-of. -- Distributivizer. Applies to 1-4.
>>
>> Either this is lu'i, or lu'i converts its referents a single
>> invididual, whereupon we would likely use a different LAhE. (I'm sure
>> there are alternatives within the baseline, but they will likely be
>> cumbersome; e.g. ro lo pafi'uro loi...) We certainly need to settle
>> which of the two alternatives lu'i means.
>
> We need more details of this, and also of what ro means when applied
> to all gadri & LAhE.

Yes, that is on the BPFK list.

>>> 8. Existentially quantified variable (Collective). Plus optional
>>> noi/poi-statement of cardinality or Superset.
>>
>> I don't understand. Is this da-as-collective as distinct from
>> da-as-individual, or something else?
>
> No. It's ordinary da. IMO the simplest gadri system is achieved by
> not distinguishing between Collective and Individual, i.e. by treating
> Individual as a singleton Collective. The distinction can be made by
> pa versus za'u as a cardinality indicator.

Which is why the Excellent Solutions reject the CLL 
individual/collective dichotomy.

> Remember too that I wasn't saying that the Lojban system should be 
> based
> on these building blocks.

Understood. It needn't be, and it won't be (lo/loi is non-negotiable); 
but this stuff should be sayable in Lojban, obviously, and should be 
sayable straightforwardly.

--
Dr Nick Nicholas [Stephen] King published _The Green Mile_ as
Research Assistant the first serialized novel since the 1920s,
French & Italian in a gesture that was meant to recall the
University of Melbourne serial work of Dickens. No doubt, King is the
Australia Dickens this century deserves.
[email protected] -- Richard von Busack, _Metro Santa Cruz_,
http://www.opoudjis.net Dec. 8-15 1999, p. 29.