the x2 place of blanu

From: John Clifford <sjepark@u...>

Subject: da blanu de

From my occasional drops-in on Lojban list (MyGAWD are they on the second

place of nitcu again/still?!)I see that things are stuck in the same cycling

rut. But I see one historical question arising anew (i.e., I haven't seen

it for several years) namely, why Loglan blanu was two-placed. So, because

i actually liked that feature and the related one, I offer a recap:

The background is a linguistic/philosophic discussion in the late 60's about

semantic primes. Two features of this slid into Loglan at the time: that

all predicates were inherently potential, becoming actualized only in

context (borrowed from Quine eventually, I think -- or at least blamed on

him) and that all "absolute" terms were actually relative. It was not clear

to what they were relative and trying to work this out was what led to

Lojban dropping this feature (that and the fact that you and John did not

like it) (The potential meaning was dropped even in Instiloglan in practice

at least because no one could figure out how to tell when the context had

actualized a term and when not.) But the cases underlying the original

comparative blanu remain to be dealt with, e.g, that a blue house is usually

much less blue than a blue sky or a blue sapphire but more so than a blue

baby and so on. The classics are things like tall dwarfs and short giants

(OK, small elephants and enormous ants). The skipped second place was

normally taken to be the typical of the named class of the first term: a

tall dwarf was (quite correctly) one taller than the typical dwarf, and so

on. But this came in conflict with the usual elision variable "something,"

leaving everything blanu apparently (well, bluer than SOMEthing).

The new "by standard..." does not solve that problem, nor does appeal to

general paradigm cases. But people seem to get by just by using the rule

they use in English (or whatever), which is what the original insight was an

attempt to make explicit.

pc

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To clarify what I said in my posting to cogling ...

Cross-cultural studies of colour terms have shown that while there is

considerable variation in the number of terms (anything from two upwards), some

things are pretty constant. One is that however many colour terms a language

has, they occur in a specific order (Berlin & Kay, 1969). Thus if a language

has only three colour terms, they will be black (dark), white (light) and red; if it has five, they will be those three plus yellow and green, and so on.

The second point is that there is substantial agreement on prototypical colours.

A speaker of a language which has a word for green but not for blue may describe

a blue object as "green", but their idea of a typical green will be the same as

for someone who also has the word "blue" (Heider (now Rosch), 1972, I think).

In other words, we don't need to worry too much about the colour gismu.

co'o mi'e robin.

• • These studies were mainly about hue. The issue with {blanu zdani} is largely about intensity (and whatever the other dimension is). In addition, I suspect some infection from the English difference beween "That house is blue" and "That is a blue house."

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The ONLY thing we seem to agree about blanu is the relationship between the

x1 and the concept "blue", so a truthful place structure for blanu might be

"x1 pertains to some concept of the color blue".

lojbab

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Lojban is haunted by the ghost of a lost sumti place... In [lapoi pelxu

ku'o trajynobli] the following exchange occurs:

...lu levi selsanga goi ko'i cu blanu za'e fe le dunra tsani be le

mexno dazyplu li'u .i ko'a bacru lu ko'i blanu fe la cart. poi ba'o

porpi li'e

(where la cart. is Chartres cathedral).