cmavo hit list - lojbab responds

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

I guess people might want me to throw le'emi re fepni in on this.  Then
again, ...

Needless to say, I more strongly defend the status quo than others
might.  In a few cases, i am not sure that what we have will be useful,
but the set of what is useful seems to change (and expand) as time goes
on - people thought that the ZAhO tenses were less than useful for a
year or two - but I am almost more comfortable using them than the
aorist simple tenses these days. ledu'u was very limited in where and
how it could be used, but Jorge prefers using it to lejei which preceded
it.  In some cases, I agree that we may have overdesigned.  BUt it is
better to do this than risk an English-biased narrowness.

Note that cmavo space was recently expanded with the addition of >2
vowel strings using appropriate apostrophes.  We have yet to actually
use any of these words (ki'e cevni).  So the tendency for cmavo to fill
the available space HAS reached a threshold.

And thus far, experimental cmavo seem to be working as planned, though
the lifetime of cmavo as experimental is shorter these days than it will
be after the dictionary is done (warning!).  They either get assigned a
real cmavo value or they disappear - the number of "xa'a" and "xe'e"
meanings seen in the last few years is intimidating, and most were far
more obscure than some Jorge wants to eliminate (Heck, I am still
waiting for someone to propose a new definition line for "kau" for the
cmavo list - the existing definition is worse than inadequate.

From: Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>
>Subject:      cmavo hit-list
>
>Here is a list of those cmavo that I do not intend to memorize. Some
>I won't use because I think they are too specific, others because I don't
>understand what they mean. The list is of course a draft and I could
>change my mind about any or all of them.

Actually, I think you HAVE used a few of them, at least in examples,
over the last few months.  I wouldn't doubt that you puca'a memorized a
few of them (I am thinking of la'i/le'i/lo'i as I write this).

>        ce'a lau tau zai
>        ga'e ge'o je'o jo'o lo'a na'a ru'o se'e to'a (character shifts)
>
>Since letterals are really pro-sumti and not letters, these shifts
>only augment the number of available pro-sumti, which is already
>pretty big. If I want to quote a fragment of, say, Greek writing,
>I have to do it with zoi gy .... gy, and the shifts are of no use.
>These could be used in mathematics, where Greek letters are very
>much used as symbols, but I don't intend to use Lojban for mathematics.

alpha particles, gamma rays, "I am the alpha and the omega" - these
things tend to crop up in non-mathematical language on occasion.
Since much Lojban discussion seems to be about Lojban, I wouldn't doubt that
long-run won't see IPA shift, or an ASCII character set shift being much used.
Still, I have to admit that word.bu has reduced the need for these by an
order of magnitude.

>A formula that involves more than two or three symbols quickly becomes
>almost incomprehensible if written down in words (be it English or Lojban).
>If written down in symbols, it can't be directly read out in grammatical
>Lojban anyway, so what's the point of having such an elaborate mekso
>system?

It is the intent that it CAN be directly read out in grammatical Lojban.

>        jo'i me'o ku'e ma'o mo'e na'u ni'e nu'a pe'o te'u vei ve'o
>        fu'u ge'a fe'i pi'i su'i vu'u fa'i gei ju'u pa'i te'a cu'a
>        de'o fe'a ne'o va'a pi'a re'a ri'o sa'i sa'o si'i fu'a ti'o
>
>These are all for MEX, I think, so I won't learn them unless they
>ever prove useful in normal conversation or for any text outside
>mathematics.

puca'a.  Try to do "four score and seven years ago" without MEX words.
(Not too easy WITH MEX words).  Most MEX-in-everyday-Lojban WILL be
short phrases that use only a few words/symbols.

>        la'i le'i lo'i
>
>The predicates that need sets as arguments usually work just as well
>with masses, but I admit that le'i and lo'i are too traditional to
>be ignored, so I will remove them from this list (I already know them
>by heart anyway). {la'i} I do find extremely useless, because the set
>of things that share a name usually share nothing else.

puca'a pilno

>        nu'o pu'i (modals)
>
>I don't understand them, unless they mean "ka'e jenai puca'a" and
>"ka'e je puca'a". If they do mean that, then pu'i doesn't say anything
>more than pu, and instead of nu'o one can say ka'e without much
>loss. If they mean something else, I don't know what that is.

As Chris Bogart said - there is a matter of emphasis.

But then you also have to realize the significance of "unrealized
potential" in evaluating truth claims when potentiality/actuality is
elliptical.  "jelca" means both "burns" and "is flammable".  "pu'i
jelca" is unambiguously "burnt" - the "-able" interpretation is
eliminated.  "nu'o jelca" is unambiguously "-able" with denial of the
actuality.  Both thus correspond to significantly occurring features in
English (at least) that are strictly speaking not implied by other
features of the language (actually, I have seen some argument that
perfective "ba'o" and realized potential "pu'i" are close in meaning,
but this is only because since I am not a speaker of a perfective
language, I cannot easily think about perfective potentials as being
useful ("perfective of being flammable" seems a lot less useful than
"perfective of actually burning", so it would take a heavy context to
have me recognize the former unmarked - but then that is why we might
have ba'onu'o - to make such an oddity clear).

>        jei li'i si'o mu'e pu'u za'i zu'o (abstractions)
>
>{jei} I don't know what it could be used for, since all the examples
>are as a substitute for {du'u xukau}, but this is not the same as the
>truth value of a bridi.

Even if that is all it means, it is a heck of a lot shorter.  But I
think "jei" will become more useful iff people start trying to talk
fuzzy logics and fuzzy sets.

>{li'i} and {si'o} I'm still not sure how to use. And has been using si'o
>lately for the opacity examples, but I would use du'u for all of those,
>and I don't see what si'o adds to it.

The classic example of li'i, from the paraplegic who proposed it, is 
"le li'i tuple" in such paraplegics.

If ledu'u is redundant to lesi'o, it is only because we made du'u a two
placer - it originally talked only about expressions.  I think that du'u
tends to emphasize the bridi-ness (truth claim ness) of a relationship
whereas si'o more strongly emphasizes the conceptual nature.  I would
feel uncomfortable using du'u for ideas that have no obvious
manifestation in the real world.

>The four subdivisions of {nu} I think I understand, but I never feel
>the need to use them instead of the simple {nu}. Maybe I will come to
>need them when I become more fluent, but for the moment I don't.

puca'a pilno quite a lot - I like them and the implied contours that
they generate.  I don't notice you complaining about the ZAhOs that
correspond to these.  If you find them useful and meaningful you will
find these.  A point event is a point event, whether it is co'i or co'a
or co'u.

>        nu'e (vocative)
>
>Why is this a vocative? It doesn't seem to have anything to do
>with the others.

John explained this.

>        fi'a (question FA)
>
>This job is already done better by cu'e, I think.

and this.

>        ze'o zo'a zo'i  (location tenses)
>
>They seem to be very similar to to'o, te'e, fa'a. The tense paper
>says something about ones relating to the speaker and the others not,
>but why then isn't this a problem with other FAhAs, which could also
>relate to the speaker or to some other point?

This came down to questions about which location tenses could be mapped
to real language usages.  Note also that the system was developed before
Cowan did his thorough space-time-reference analysis, so that the
explanations or the distinctions are all post hoc.

I think Finnish was one of those languages that has many more locative
prepositions (and cases?) than English has, so perhaps Veijo could
comment.

>        bu'a bu'e bu'i  (logically quantified predicate variables)
>
>I don't know how to use them.

They are part of the little-used logical apparatus of Lojban, but
necessary to the claim of BEING a logical language.  Our handling of 2nd
order predicate logic is incomplete, though, so the usefulness of these
even in logical contexts, remains to be seen.

>        go'a go'e go'u nei (pro-bridis)
>
>It seems an excess to have three pro-bridis for bridis before
>the last one. Only one I think would be more than enough. Also,
>I can't think of any reasonable use for nei.

I have used go'a and go'e in conversation, and maybe even go'u once.
go'e is useful in dichotomies. go'a and go'u are going to be used in
relative proportion to go'i, about with the same ratio as ra and ru are
to ri - and for the same reason.  

nei will not be used except in multiply nested bridi structures such as
relative clauses and abstractions.  Even I can;t keep straight whether
these overlap with the default for vo'a.  But even if they do, the choice
between vo'a and le nei will have grammatical consequences.

>        da'e da'u de'e de'u do'i
>
>They also seem too many. It would be nice if they could refer to
>only part of a bridi, like the inside of an abstraction.

It would.  But there are too many possibilities to cover.  Perhaps a
subscription technique will be devised for some possibilities.  Again,
thsi comes down to the choice between "lenu go'i" and "la'edi'u".

>        si'e (portion selbri)
>
>Seems redundant to mei. What's the difference between {pimusi'e} and
>{pimumei}? [From the definition in the cmavo list it would appear
>that {resi'e} would be a half, but the examples of the list suggest
>it is {pimusi'e}.]

si'e is intended for masses, and mei for units.  Perhaps they could be 
combined - perhaps not.  But pimusi'e [pie] is half of a pie, whereas
both pieces of pie are lo pamei [pie], NOT lo pimumei [pie].

>        na'o  (typically)
>
>I don't understand how it differs from ta'e.

This has been discussed, though I'll accept not to your satisfaction.

I habitually celebrate my birthday, but celebrating my birthday is not a
state I will typically be found in.  My computer (and I) is/are
habitually logged into this email address, but not typically so.

>        dau fei gai jau rei vai (hex digits)
>
>What a waste of top quality cmavo...

Depends on your priorities.  And remember that a few years ago,
Lojbanists were going to tell time in base 12.  One thing is certain:
IF we want to allow for the possibility of using such systems without
the bias for decimals of the current system, they need to be
monosyllables.  And I have always abhorred the use of alphabetics for
these numbers.

>        vu'i sei se'o fu'e fu'o
>
>These are on probation until I work out what they mean :)

sei is much used and vital - makes many things done in natlangs MUCH more 
natural in Lojban than they could otherwise be.  The original use was
prompted by Athelstan's translation of The Open Window, where we had to
address the question of embedded metalinguistic unquotation (the putting of
"he said"/"she said" in the middle of the quoted text rather than at one end,
which is stylistically boring at the least).

Cowan explained the others.


Chris Bogart responded:
>>        da'e da'u de'e de'u do'i
>>
>>They also seem too many. It would be nice if they could refer to
>>only part of a bridi, like the inside of an abstraction.
>
>I've only used "di'u" and "di'e" (which you don't include here because
>they're obviously useful).  I wish there was something that could refer to
>*several* sentences, because I often want to refer vaguely to a previous
>block of discourse without really pinpointing one sentence.  But if getting
>out of that habit is more lojbanic, I can learn to live without it.

These words can be used for several sentences given context - they are
thus vaguer than "go'i" and kin.

>>        dau fei gai jau rei vai (hex digits)
>>
>>What a waste of top quality cmavo...
>
>The dau/fei/gai I like because we've got so many things, like months and
>hours, that come in twelves.  jau/rei/vai are admittedly not very useful; I
>can't think when the last time was I verbally read off a number in hex.

Do you work in an octal computing world?  The people who use hex in
everyday life (mostly programmers of course) occasionally have to read
the numbers off verbally.  My wife has to, and she's professionally a
COBOList, not a systems programmer.  She also uses a hex calculator at
work a lot.

>>        na'o  (typically)
>>
>>I don't understand how it differs from ta'e.
>
>In the last sentence of the previous paragraph, I couldn't use "ta'e"
>because it is not my habit that makes me find a .UI I like sometimes and not
>other times.  So habitually's not right, nor is "continuous" or "regular",
>or for that matter "discontinuous" or "irregular".  What I want is something
>more like "often" or "usually", which is vague as to the peroidicity,
>continuousness, or habit-relatedness of an action.  Maybe I could have used
>"piso'eroi" instead?

I think na'o fits, though there are alternatives.


>>         dau fei gai jau rei vai (hex digits)
>>
>> What a waste of top quality cmavo...
>
>Tragic. Also consider "su" - erase-to-start-of-discourse. Does the
>frequency with which we'll wish to do that justify using up a lovely
>CV cmavo? NO WAY! There are other cases where cmavo space has been
>squandered with equal profligacy.

What, have you never dropped a subject?  In Lojban conversation, we do
it a LOT, especially when lojbab starts talking about linguistic matters
in language and la noras and la sivian. get disgusted.  It also is being
used to table discussions.

>Also, the foha & koha series could have been shrunk and expanded at
>the same time by using a singlecmavo plus a number. E.g. supa sure
>sici (where SU is put to a better use as this cmavo).

Subscripts are possible in the current language.  We assigned 5 because
JCB had 5. We then realized it was easy to need more than 5. Again, look
to The Open Window.  Now we have re-realized, as JCB did, that lerfu as
anaphora may be more suitable.  But the 10 assigned members of ko'a are
still valuable in a language that has no gender or number on pronouns.
I think longer texts will tend to use these a lot, especially if, as may
happen, the lerfu words turn out to have insufficient sound contrast for
easy and accurate recognition in a rapid speech stream.  They didn't
invent alfa/bravo/charlie for nothing in English, and Lojban has the
problem that led to this even worse, while having more places than in
English where lerfu are nominally useful.

lojbab