The Koan of Ve Botpi
August 28, 2021
Tags: [
lojban conlangs
The simple believe anything, but the prudent give thought to their steps.
Let us examine the word “botpi”.
botpi: x1 is a bottle/jar/urn/flask/closable container for x2, made of material x3 with lid x4. (Vlasisku)
We know from CLL 7.7 that unfilled selbri places default to zo'e.
The cmavo of the zo’e-series represent indefinite, unspecified sumti. The cmavo zo’e represents an elliptical value for this sumti place; it is the optional spoken place holder when a sumti is skipped without being specified.
.i xu botpi? This has very serious implications. Suppose I wished to refer to this bottle here. Were I to say…
to mibypre toi ti botpi
(Me): This is a bottle.
…I would be lying. Were I in court, I would be charged with perjury. All of my friends will turn their backs on me for my deceitful character.
Why is this so? It is because when I say .i ti botpi, I am actually saying .i ti botpi zo'e zo'e zo'e. I am claiming that there exists at least one thing that satisfies ve botpi, or the cap. Given that the bottle has no cap, it is therefore not botpi, but botpi fo zi'oThe cmavo zi'o deletes a place from a selbri. See CLL 7.7 . The wise jbopre ought to consider carefully the terbri of their selbri. There exists a jbofuvi otpi, meaning simply x1 is a bottle/jar/urn/flask.
In contemporary Lojban as is spoken in La Roljbogu’e, unfilled places usually are taken to mean zo'e jonai zi'o. This “forces” one to obey Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Relation. If a place is truly important, one ought to explicitly say zo'e.
Other loglangs
I have sometimes described Lojban as being the “Latin of Loglangs”, because of many reasons, this being one of them. The idea of predicate place structures is something that basically all loglangs have some version of.
As of the writing of this article, Eberban is very early in its development and its documentation is being rewritten. It is very possible that this will change. In Eberban, unfilled places are simply filled with an existence claim (i.e. there exists at least one thing that fulfills this spot). It is analogous to Lojban su'o da.
These are languages I’m familiar with. If you have knowledge of other loglangs like Gua\spi, please email me so I can add to this section. In Toaq, unfilled places are simply deleted, akin to zi'o-ing away all unfilled places in Lojban selbri.
Further reading
all places equally important gotcha: Partly the source of this post. inconsistent Place Structures Gotcha: Especially annoying given standard place semantics.