Re: cukta

[Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>]

la nitcion cusku di'e

> And this one of the areas I was thinking about, when I said the other day
> that Lojban will probably succeed by failing in its avowed aims. Lojban
> (I claim) is built on a particular view of semantics: one in which {le jei
> da broda} is taken as 0 or 1 --

Can you use {le jei da broda} in a sentence? Besides the use as meaning
something like {le du'u xukau da broda}, I haven't figured out how it
can be used. Supposedly, it is a truth value, 0 or 1 or something in
between, but how is it used? Does it work just like a number? What type
of terbri can be filled with a {le jei ... } sumti?

> Now prototype semantics, which is a more, I dunno, postformal view of
> semantics, would go for a fuzzy logic approach to le jei da broda, rather
> than a truth-conditional approach. What is a book? Well, a book has certain
> prototypical properties: it has pages, it has text printed on these pages,
> it conveys recorded discourse. If something has all these properties, it's
> a book. If it has none of them, it's no book.
>
> What if it has only some? Like a CD ROM, or an empty book, or an Ionesco
> work?

No, no, no, you're mixing two different concepts. The CD ROM, the empty book,
the object in which Ionesco's work is printed, are all objects that share
some properties, and could all be encompassed by a generous word. The Ionesco
work itself shares properties with the program stored in the CD ROM and with
something you might write on the empty book.

In English, "book" is used for these two concepts: the Ionesco work and the
bound pages in which it is printed. In lojban, these two concepts are
related with the selbri {cukta}, one goes in the x1 and the other in the x2
place.

There's nothing wrong with extending the meaning from printed pages to other
methods of recording, or from a written work to say, a story in pictures.
But to use the same word for the two concepts just because English does it
is a different matter.

[...]
> Let us assert core meanings for gismu as we always have done.

Exactly, and you can wander more or less from those core meanings, but
if a word in English, like "book", has two different core meanings, let us
not confuse them into one with the excuse of fuzzy logic.

> But let us also realise that, whatever our core definition of cukta, *it is
> in the nature of humans using language* to extend the meaning of terms to
> other, related notions

As long as that "relation" is not "the two notions use the same word in
English (or any other language)", then I don't have anything against
extending meanings.

> (metaphorically, we would say, although I'm being
> persuaded over here at the Linguistics Institute that the mechanism is
> primarily contextual association, and metaphor is a by-product.)

In this case, I don't see any metaphors, rather container and contents are
being described with the same word "book".

> It's going to happen.

Yes. But one can argue anyway...

> It is not a bad thing.

Nothing that's inevitable can really be said to be bad. (Maybe that's too
philosophical for good taste.)

> It does not mean we should give up the
> attempt towards formal explicitness. But it is a factor making the overall
> equation much more complex --- and, I believe, much more interesting, and
> much more illuminating about what language is there for.
>
> Which is what we are interested in Lojban for in the first place, I tend to
> think...

Is it? Maybe it's just for fun... :)

Jorge