Re: restrictive modification of names

[John Cowan <cbmvax!UUNET.UU.NET!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan>]

la and. rost. cusku di'e

> If this is so, then a cmene is a one place predicate meaning "x1 is called
> [cmene]".

I think this overstates the case, but has a measure of truth in it.  I believe
a more accurate statement would be that names only appear in Lojban in
implicit quotation marks.

In my interlinear translations, "la" is usually not glossed:

        la .and. brito
        And is-British.

But if I were to gloss "la", I would gloss it thus:

        la .and. brito
        At-least-one-of-those-called "And" is-British.

So we see that ".and." in "la .and." is a mention rather than a use, and
the effect of "la" is to convert from mention to use.

The other use of names, of course, is vocative:

        coi .and.
        greetings-to-the-one-called "And".

Here again, the name is effectively in quotation marks until dereferenced;
indeed "coi .and." and "coi la .and." are synonymous.

> John cowan's characteristically perspicuous posting on this matter
> confirms the above.

Thank you, and not least for the word "perspicuous", which no one I know
ever uses, save me.

> Now why I posted my original query is that in English names do not
> work like this. Normal words usually have a sense: the sense of
> _cat_ is the prototypical cat, or the category of cats, or whatever
> you want to call it. The referent of some instance of the word
> _cat_ (i.e. the word when used) is an instance of the prototypical
> cat (or a member of the cat category, etc.). Names, though, are
> different: they don't have senses. They have specific referents
> independently from any context. So whereas a dictionary would under
> the entry for _cat_ make no mention of any particular cat as the
> meaning of the word, under an entry for _Bob LeChevalier_ it
> would say not "entity called Bob LeChevalier" but "prominent
> figure in Loglan movement, born 1950s, married, lives Boston" etc.

Washington, but no matter.

> If Lojban doesn't have names like English does, it leads to
> an interesting situation. _La bob_ doesn't mean "entity named
> bob" because there aren't any names. Rather, it means "entity
> belonging to a category denoted by the word _bob_, having unpredictable
> membership". The category "bob" is an extensionally defined set.
> So when we meet someone for the first time, we should ask not
> "What is your name" but "which 'LA set' do you belong to", where
> 'LA set' is a term covering all categories introduced by
> the word _la_, _lai_, etc.

When we speak in Lojban, that's essentially what we do.

        do se cmene ma
        you are-named what?

        zo djan.
        "John".

The word "cmene" after all is a predicate, relating a thing (the x1)
to a word (the x2).  From the Lojban point of view, then, "cmene" means
"is the name of", or in your terminology "denotes the LA-set whose member is".

--
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban