Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
> Er?? Isn't Lojban human? I don't recall that it was
> designed by
> uncompromisingly logical Vulcans or other such
> aliens.
>
> I thought (one of) the bases of Lojban & Loglan is
> that these are designed
> in accordance with Clausal Form Logic (another human
> concept). Thus,
> because it is planned according to a model of
> humanly devised logic, it is
> likely to be 'more logical' than a natlang that has
> evolved over millennia
> and picked up the odd illogicality here & there. But
> it's only a matter of
> degree IMO. Humans are not God, and I've not the
> slightest doubt that some
> will claim that this or that feature in Lojban is
> not logical.
All right, I put it the wrong way. What I meant is
that natlangs weren't intended to be logical, while
logical conlangs are. We agree.

> After all, the 'philosophic' conlangs of the 18th
> century claimed to be
> 'perfectly logical' (I've seen the same claim made
> of Esperanto, more than
> once). I doubt whether anyone now considers these
> languages as examples of
> logic. I wonder how Lojban will be viewed three
> centuries from now.
Yes, surely it is hard to make a really logical system
while concepts are still under discussion, and
probably still will be for a long time. As I always
say: methodology ! (but trying is fun, I agree).

>
> > but NOT, for ex,
> > "A rose is a flower",
>
> Why not??? A rose, i.e. an individual rose, is an
> instance of a flower!
IMO, if you say "a rose is a flower", that normally
means "the subcategory of roses belong to the category
of flowers", that's why I don't call it an instance
(maybe the word is not the right one, even if I find
it ok). But when the Little Prince (in Saint-Exupery)
talks about "ma rose", this is a final (individual)
instance. You cannot subdivide it any more. The same
with Winston Churchill. You can say that he was an
Englishman, but not that something was a
winston-churchill (except of course in tropes: cet
homme est un Harpagon = he is a miser).

>
> > and yet much less, "Rex is
> > brown", "Rex is dead",
>
> Sorry, but I have to disagree. I see no a_priori
> reason for denying that
> Rex is an instance of Things-that-are-brown, or of
> Dead-Things.
No, really, I cannot feel it this way, although it's
hard for me to explain exactly why, especially in
English. I just feel that a "dog" is perceived as an
entity (a thing of its own), while "a thing that is
brown" is not [and yet, when you think of a dog, you
probably imagine some particular kind of dog, a
prototype; but what is the prototype of a brown thing
?]. These are two different concepts. And I bet a wide
majority of people will say so, if you except
linguists (and philosophs) of course (because they
have a "twisted mind"). But the fact is that a spoken
language is shared by many non-linguist,
non-philosoph, people, so what a linguist or a
philosoph (or a scientist) might think is only
incident: it doesn't necessary reflect the common
sense.

> In Platonic logic, we would say that that Rex
> participates in the Form
> called Brown. Plato's Forms (Ideai) are rather like
> the abstract classes
> of OOP, except to Plato the Forms are more real that
> the physical world of
> which they partake.
>
> > "Rex is Lassie's son", or
> > whatever.
>
> Rex is an instance of a son of Lassie. Even if
> Lassie has no sons, we can
> still form an abstraction Son-of-Lassie. When a son
> appears, we have an
> instantiation of the abstract Son-of-Lassie.
Nonono. The kind of conceptual relation is not at all
the same. The mixing up, IMO, precisely comes from the
confusion in natlangs.

> > It just happens that English will use "is"
> > is all these cases, just like when you have no
> > screw-driver at hand, you might use a Swiss knife,
> or
> > a usual knife, or your teeth.
>
> I don't recommend teeth for driving screws home!
That's what I'm suggesting.

> >  But it would be better
> > to use the right tool if we had it.
> >
> > If you want to build an automatic translator
> between,
> > say, English and Tagalog, or Hungarian and
> Cherokee,
> [snip - I return this later]
>
> > So, if the rules are well conceived, you might
> come to
> > final forms like "Rex absents", which would be
> quite
> > OK in the target language (for ex: Latin),
>
> 'Rex absents' is not satisfactory in English because
> you've left the
> object out! It's a transitive verb in English,
> usually reflexive. "Rex
> absents himself" would be perfectly OK in, say the
> context of a meeting
> where most of us are expecting Rex, then someone
> informs us that Rex is
> absenting himself frm the meeting.
That's what I say too. To take another example, in
Russian you say "Evo netu": Of-him (there-is)-not,
meaning "He's not here". Surely this would sound awful
to Anglo-Saxon ears (or rather, minds). And yet, the
meaning of "of-him not" and "he's not here" is very
closely the same.

[snip]

>
> English does have a verb "to cat". It's transitive
> and may mean:
> - to raise [the anchor] to the cathead (one of two
> beams projecting from
> the bow of a ship through which passes the tackle
> used to raise the anchor)
> - to vomit [something]
> - to beat [someone] with a cat-o'-nine-tails (a whip
> with nine knotted
> tails or lashes, once used in the army & navy)
(...)
> True of English (and probably French), as you can
> see the meanings of "to
> dog" and "to cat" do not have the same relation to
> the animals concerned;
> we also have in English "to fox", "to wolf" and, I'm
> certain, a few other
> 'animal verbs' as well.
Yes, and I believe there is a verb "to mouse" in
English too. There seems to be much more of such verbs
in English than in French. Do you happen to have a
verb "to elephant" ? (if not, I at least found a
proper example).



=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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