Re: jei

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Lojbab:
> >"Jei" is really an unwarranted shorthand for "x1 [a number] is truth
> >value [jitfa zei jetnu] fe lo duhu broda".
>
> Unwarranted?  why?  And "falsishly-true is not in the least a meaningful tanru
> to me, nor would it fly under Nick's lujvo place structure conventions.  YOu
> are stretching because you don'yt like the thing.  But it predates ledu'u,
> explicitly acknowledges that truth values are different from the statements
> that they evaluate, and preserve a way to talk about fuzzy logic if it becomes
> more useful in the strongly truth-functional world of Lojbanists.

"Jitfa zei jetnu" is a bad lujvo, but this is beside the point. By all
means please propose a better one.

Certain members of NU - certainly nu, duhu & siho - are indispensable,
& cannot really by got at by paraphrase. "Jei", on the other hand can
be got at by selbri "is the truth value of" plus a loduhu sumti. This
would allow us to talk about fuzzy logic.

Maybe "unwarranted" is too strong, but I meant that it isn't really
an abstraction, but rather a property of an abstraction (duhu) & therefore
would not be rendered by a NU if the grammar matched the logic.

> >This is a bit of a mouthful, but I'd rather see a gadri version of
> >"makau" used to abbreviate this, as in "Mi djuno fe/fi [makau [jifyjetnu
> >be lo duhu broda]]".
>
> Remembering that "lenu" and "lejei" and "ledu'u" ARE single word gadri in
> JCB's world (he doesn't actually have the latter two, but his NU can be joined
> to the preceding LE with changed grammar, and JCB considers this joined-word
> version of NU to be not an abbreviation for the disjoint version), I think we
 have already historically done what you ask - you can if you want, think of
> "lejei" as an abrreviation for thatmouthful including bthe "be lo du'u" after
 it.  lejei, like lenu is a gadri that takes an abstraction rathe rthan a
> description.

We don't have a gadri version of Q-kau in general; we only have lojei
short for "loduhu xukau". I think what I'd actually like to see is an
intrrogative sumti, "xahu", so we can get "mi djuno xahu mamta do" (I
know who is your mother).
This wouldn't handle all uses of Q-kau, by any means, but it would
often afford considerable brevity. Maybe someone more ingenious can think
of a more general abbreviatory device, but at any rate such would be
welcome.

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And