BPFK Section: lerfu Shifts
Rab spir:
<<On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 07:23:52AM -0800, John E Clifford wrote:
> And, if you're in a context where you can't draw the symbol at all:
> (1) What will you gain from describing the symbol?
> (2) Wouldn't you be better off describing how it's drawn, instead of
> its
> lerfu name?>>
>
>
> The same objections apply, of course, to all lerfu. I would assume
that the various implication marks had different names (single arrow,
double arrow, horseshoe, hook, to mention the most common). And why,
exactly (though you claim to have explained it before) is pronouncing the
symbol useless?
>
> In the good old days (about last week it seems) the fact that somone
thought he had a use for something in lojban was enough for
half-a-dozen people to start with suggestions about how to do it; it was rarely the case that the response was to try to convince him he really had no
such use (and, maybe, didn't even rally think he did).
The problem is not that the name of a symbol isn't expressible in
Lojban. It's that it's as expressible as it is in other languages. If
you have a symbol you want to call a horseshoe, you can call it "lo
xircutci tarmi sinxa".
But there's something that makes people want to express this, not using
a meaningful phrase like "lo xircutci tarmi sinxa", but using some
clever, contrived, and generally incomprehensible cmavo trick.>>
I am not clear why the trick is incomprehensible – once the rule is worked out. It may not be inferable from other things in the language, but then neither are most things. And, of course, I did not require (even suggest, I think) that the device was a cmavo in the strict sense of that term – though it would seem to have to fit into some cmavo grammatical category, probably BY.
<<I remember hearing that when Lojban was being originally developed,
people wanted to be able to express every conceivable typographical
symbol with its own cmavo, so the _entire_ c??? cmavo space was
suggested to be set aside for lerfu. (pc, you could probably get the
details more accurate than I'm getting them, of course).
I assume that somebody suddenly remembered that Zipf guy, because
thankfully that didn't happen.>>
Not quite what happened but to that effect. The original Loglan, the 1960 Scientific American form, had enough not just puctuations but typesetting marks to make LaTeX look simpleminded. But it was not (directly) Zipf that killed them; it was JCB needing space to do a mess of other things and just taking what he thought he could get along without (but, as you note, never losing them entirely). That is ultimately Zipfy, to be sure, but the move was not conscious. I seem to recall that some similar proposal was made in among the thousands tht flew around in the late 80s-early 90s for Lojban, but the fate of the Loglan cases was enough to quell that particular swell (if it was that big) and we fell back on essentially the Loglan solution (in spirit, if not always in details). We did keep the lerfu properly so called and the whole muck of MEX.
<<Was that the quashing of a useful feature that someone wanted? No, that
was keeping sanity in the language. (Still, the lerfu fetish managed to
leave its mark in the form of 'lau'.) The trend that I try to fight is
that someone says they don't know how to express a certain thing in
Lojban, and several people propose _new language constructs_ (sure,
They can be hacked out of old cmavo, but they're a new interpretation) to
say that thing, even when existing constructs in the language already work.
Coming up with new language constructs is fun, but unless they're
actually beneficial they simply make Lojban more complicated.>>
I don’t follow this. Where is the new language construct here? All the suggestions so far have been well within the existing constructs, being just new instances of those constructs. And what different form does the job in mind, being pronounced ins spelling out a physical string? Would you want to spell by describing each letter as in the jazz spelling of Mississippi (em eye crooked letter crooked letter eye/ crooked letter crooked letter eye humpback humback eye) only completely?
xorxes:
<<> What we want is a transform of {pybu ?bu kuybu cu vlina le natfe be
py (?)
> kuy (first ? for the unknown symbol, second for whether there need
be a
> break to kee the p and q from running together in a literal string)
"P" is to "py" as "Q" is to "kybu"
"py" is to "pybu" as "kybu" is to "kybubu">>
Thanks. I can never remember how to handle odd letters in Lojban’s deficient alphabet. I suppose that {kuy} is illegit in some way. Pity.
<<So I think what you mean, taking say {implik. bu} for the symbol
in question, is:
pybu implik.bu kybubu vlina le natfe be py boi kybu
But, shouldn't it be {me'o pybu implik.bu kybubu}?>>
Otherwise we seem to have just some odd pronoun.
An I'm not quite sure why {pybu} and {kybubu} instead
of {py} and {kybu}. After all, {py} and {pybu} are simply
two different lerfu. It is not clear that one is more of
a symbol than the other.>>
Thanks again. The {me’o}, however otherwise obnoxious, does allow me to come down a {bu} and still avoid the pronoun problem (which I did not avoid anyhow, as you note).
> The same objections apply, of course, to all lerfu.
I too think all lerfu, except in their use as pronouns,
are objectionable. I think mixing lerfu with names
of symbols and characters is very confusing.
> I would assume that the
> various implication marks had different names (single arrow, double
arrow,
> horseshoe, hook, to mention the most common).
And presumably different authors might use different symbols
for the same concept, and one symbol might be used by different
authors for different concepts. So "single arrow" may or may
not correspond with "implication symbol", depending on context.
I've no idea whether a lerfu could represent "single arrow",
"implication symbol", neither, or both, or some combination.
> And why, exactly (though you
> claim to have explained it before) is pronouncing the symbol useless?
I'm not even sure at this point whether the symbol is to be
pronounced according to its form or to its function.>>
This discussion had begun to feel hauntingly familiar until xorxes’ last couple of remarks brought the “original” to mind. In the Middle Ages, writing was free of most punctuation marks (except abbreviations and indications of those). This led to major ambiguities in closely reasoned debates – philosophical/theological arguments. So a whole theory developed – supposition – to account for and remove the ambiguities. Though the names varied, there were usually at least the following types of “meanings” of expressions:
The physical expression itself: “Man has three letters”
The expression as a bit of language: “Man is a noun”
The expression as referring to a concept: “Man is subsumed under animal.”
The expression as presenting a concept: “Man is a rational animal”
The exprssion as referring to objects “Man is any human or any male human”
What is happening here is a failure to distinguish among some of the earlier of these critters. I think I was looking for a way to present the physical expression orally rather than in writing. In that case, different forms of the implication sign would probably have different representations. But I may have meant bits of language (and I a pretty certainly shifted back and forth between at least these two), in which case the shape of the sign would be unimportant and its function (as a contrast to say alternation sign or quantifier) would be more significant. In the sentence I aimed at and missed, however, I was pretty clearly dealing with meaning and so the logical function comes to the fore, the shape being even less important than before.
Now, quite frankly, I want to do at least all three of these things – on different occasions – and to keep them clearly separated when they come close to one another (and it would be nice if this could be by devices that could be extended throughout MEX, since it seems to be pervaded by this kind of imprecision – leaving aside all its other problems). And it does not seem to me that we can always rely on context to sort these critters out, so we “need” (no one but an occasional philosopher is going to get caught in this except occasionally – Korzybski to the contrary notwithstanding) either different symbols or a disambiguating device to be called up when needed. I have no problem with descriptive names, suitably modified to indicate they are symbols ({lo xircutri tanxi sinxa} is just the wrong grammatical type for use in the form of an expression as such): {zai xircutri bu} or {lau…} or whatever does for that. Similarly, {nafyvlina bu} does find once the conceptual level is
reached; the linguistic one could go either way I guess.
And maybe part of the solution lies in {la’e} and {lu’e}, though that may require something new.