d from d.(Return to the Table of Contents)
Notes 262
In the previous chapter we talked about the ways in which a speaker could use the predicate apparatus of a language to make claims, to give information, to frame new insights, and so forth. But to use a predicate is also to indicate one's willingness to show one's listeners how to use or test the truth of the relationship or perception that it claims. If I tell you 'X is taller than Y' or 'Z is an intellectual dwarf', I must evidently be prepared to answer such questions as 'How do you know?' 'In what way?' 'How can I tell?' and so on. For if I am a knowing and responsible speaker, I must be able to follow up any such use of a predicate with such remarks as 'Well, if you talk to Z, you will find he is no intellectual giant', or 'If you put X and Y back to back and hold a carpenter's level over their heads, and then keep it level while you lower it, you will find that it touches X's head before it touches Y's.' In fact if I cannot follow up my predications with instructions of this--or some other--sort, people will begin to suspect that I don't know what I am talking about.
But you might also ask an entirely different kind of question about either of these same remarks. You might ask 'Who's X?' or 'Who's Z?' Obviously the most elaborate instructions for testing the claim that X is taller than Y, or the most illuminating comment on Z's dwarfed intellectuality, will not be of much use unless you know the identity of the individuals to whom these predicates are supposed to apply. And again, just by using such arguments as 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' in such remarks I am evidently indicating my willingness to help you locate the objects to which my predicates apply. For example, I might answer 'X is that red-haired fellow standing over there.' And again, if I am unwilling or unable to give you locating information of this--or some other--sort, people are likely to suspect that I don't know who I am talking about.
But the two kinds of information are very different. To tell you what I mean by a predication is to give you a recipe for testing it, on anything. But to tell you to whom or on what I intend that predication to apply, is to give you the address, so to speak, of just those objects. Predicates make claims. Arguments designate the individuals, or sets of individuals, those claims are about. By one linguistic convention or another, they help the listener to locate those things in space-time.
Suppose I say 'I am taller than you are.' You will not, if you understand English, have to inquire who or what I mean to designate by the arguments 'I' and 'you'. For you will know that anyone who uses 'I' in an English sentence means to designate himself, and here I am. Similarly, if I am gazing directly at you when you hear me say 'you', you will have no difficulty in locating the second object I have designated. For by a similar convention of spoken English you know that 'you' designates the person addressed, and here you are, too. In contrast, the references of 'X' and 'Y', like those of the pronouns 'he', 'she' and 'it', are not so easily located. Like the Loglan variables da, de and di, they require a context of previously-spoken sentences from which to infer what they mean. I can start out talking about you and me, for you know immediately who we are; but I cannot usually start talking to you in sentences in which the only arguments are 'he' and 'she' or da and de. For, as we shall see, the conventions of both Loglan and English require that I use these "third person" variables to refer to things which have already been referred to in some other way.
This, then, was the essential artificiality of the sentences we studied in the preceding chapter. None of their arguments designated anything; for no listener could have located the things to which those arguments apparently referred. We must now look more closely into these matters. We will find that very special conventions surround the machinery of designation in any language. When successfully used, these conventions lead to the possibility of the listener's locating the things to which the speaker has referred. Just how these locating conventions are arranged in Loglan is the subject of the present chapter.1
The simplest way a speaker can locate something for a listener is by pointing to it. Then if, in addition, he wishes to say something about the object at which he is pointing, most languages provide one or more convenient little words to serve as arguments of the predicate which says that thing. In Loglan the variables ti [tee] and ta [tah] serve this "demonstrative" function, as in the following sentences:
| (1) | Ti bukcu | This is a book. |
| (2) | Ta bakso | That's a box. |
Just as in English there are two of these words. The convention is that if two objects are to be demonstratively designated, ti will be used for the closer or the later of them, while ta will be used for the farther or the earlier. If only one object is to be referred to, either ti or ta may be used.
The relationship between both ti and ta and the thing it refers to is usually a transitory one. Thus in the same context of speech I may use the word ti many different times to refer to many different things. For example, I may walk down a row of objects on a shelf and refer to each of them in turn as ti, just as I may say 'This is a cat; this is a dog; this is a mouse' in English. In this respect, the demonstrative variables differ from the other variables we are about to study in that their references may vary within the same context of speech. They are in this sense the most variable of the Loglan argument forms.
Sometimes when we use 'this' and 'that' in English we aren't referring to objects in the world immediately around us but to something someone has said or alluded to. Thus when someone says something we agree with, we often say 'That's true.' In a logical language one must keep references of that kind distinct from references to the object world. This is the same difference--first pointed out by the positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap--that philosophers now refer to as the difference between the "object language" and the "metalanguage". In its simplest terms the metalanguage is the language we use to talk about language. 'That's true' is an excellent example. We use the pair of demonstratives toi [toy] and toa [toh-ah] for this metalinguistic purpose in Loglan.
| (1) | Toi tradu | That's true (literally, this is true). |
| (2) | Toa falji [FAHL-zhee] | That's false (that earlier claim was false). |
On most occasions of their use, disyllabic operators like [toh-ah] will have "level stress"; that is, neither syllable will be stressed.
But there is still another kind of demonstrative pronoun. Suppose someone tells you 'John is sick today.' You say 'That's bad!' Is it da's sentence you are referring to? No; it is the situation described by that sentence that you are saying is bad. So neither Ta zavlo ('That object over there is bad!') nor Toa zavlo ('That sentence you uttered is bad, i.e., ill-formed') will do. In a logical language we need still a third pair of demonstratives to refer to the absent situations to which the sentences spoken in our immediate vicinity often refer. In Loglan we use tio [tyoh] and tao [tow] for this meta-metalinguistic purpose.
| (3) | Tio zavlo | This is bad (i.e., the situation just alluded to is bad). |
| (4) | Tao gudbi | That's good (the situation previously alluded to is good). |
In English we tend to use 'that' in both these situations. We say 'That's bad' and 'That's good' whether the allusion was made in the most recent sentence or not. Possibly this is because of the remoteness from the scene of speech of the meta-metalinguistical world.
So in Loglan we have three pairs of demonstratives: ti ta for immediately perceived things; toi toa for pieces of recent speech or writing; and tio tao for absent situations to which pieces of recent speech or writing allude.
As a speaker of a logical language you will find these distinctions very useful...even though the chances are very good that you have never made them before.2
These are the argument-forms that we used without comment throughout the previous chapter. You sensed in that context that they were very like the X Y Z's of the mathematician. This is correct; for unlike the English third person pronouns which they often translate, the Loglan free variables may stand for anything at all: single things or plural sets of things ('it' or 'they'), subjects or objects ('he' or 'him'), animate or inanimate things ('she' or 'it'), and males or females ('him' or 'her'). Moreover, each of the five free variables may be used in any of these ways.
Like English third person pronouns, Loglan free variables are usually introduced into speech as short replacements of other, longer designations that have already been made. For example, in the sequence of English sentences,
(1) Christopher Columbus visited the Queen of Spain.
(2) He persuaded her that the Earth was round.
the pronouns 'he' and 'her' in (2) replace the longer designations 'Christopher Columbus' and 'the Queen of Spain' that first occurred in (1). In Loglan we often make the same kind of replacement with free variables. As in English, they may replace (i) names, (ii) descriptions, and (iii) demonstratives. They may not replace each other or the Loglan equivalents of 'I' and 'you'. In a moment you will see why.
Now the reason that pronouns are often inflected for number and gender in the natural languages is primarily to allow the listener to make a fair guess at the identity of the name, description or demonstrative for which each pronoun is a substitute. For example, it is because we know the genders of Christophers and queens, that we can be fairly certain that 'he' replaces 'Christopher Columbus' and 'her' replaces 'the Queen of Spain' and not the other way round. But the Loglan variables are totally uninflected. Obviously, some other system of identifying the objects they replaced must be found.3
In Loglan the replacement system governing the references of free variables is based on the order in which they are used. It is as if, when speech commences, the five free variables were sitting on a shelf in alphabetical order in both the speaker's and the listener's mind. Then as speech progresses they are continually matched up with the arguments they might replace in the sentences that have already occurred. When a free variable is used to replace another argument, it is taken off the shelf, so to speak, and the others are shifted along it to form a new order. The matching with potential replacements then proceeds as before. Let us illustrate this process with an example.
Suppose someone commences a conversation by pointing to something and saying:
| (3) | La Djan, pa vedma ta le fumna | John sold that to the woman. |
In this sentence there is a name (La Djan), a demonstrative (ta) and a description (le fumna). All of them are replaceable by free variables. Let us see how.
Suppose the speaker now wants to add that the woman who bought the indicated object then gave it to a person named Pete. Well, the five free variables are all unused, and as he spoke sentence (3) the speaker unconsciously matched the first of them, da, with the last designation in the previous sentence, which is the one it may replace, namely le fumna. So da is now available to talk about the woman. But the speaker also unconsciously matched the second free variable, de, with the second-from-the-last argument used, namely ta. So de is available as a more permanent designation of that object than ta is. (Recall that the demonstratives are temporary designations and may not be used a second time to designate the same thing.) Finally, the third-from-the-last designation is La Djan; this has been matched by the speaker with the third variable di. And if he wanted to mention John again, the speaker could now do so by using the variable di.
But he doesn't. What he wants to say is that the woman--who is potentially da--gave the object--which is potentially de--to some new person named Pete. So he says:
| (4) | Da pa donsu la Pit, de | X gave Pete Y. |
Now because the listener--let us suppose, for our referential convenience, a woman--is playing by the same rules, she has also made this same unconscious matching; and she therefore knows that da refers to the same object as the last previous designation, namely le fumna, does, and that de replaces the second-to-the-last designation she has heard, namely ta. Moreover, had she heard the variable di she would have known that it referred to John. But she didn't.
Now as soon as these two variables, da and de, come off the shelves in the speaker's and listener's mind, then a new matching must be made. For if the speaker thinks back over what he has now said he will find that the last replaceable designation he has made is not La Djan in (3) but la Pit in (4). Consequently, after speaking sentence (4) a new matching set-up is formed in the speaker's and listener's mind in which di now matches la Pit and the fourth variable do now refers back to La Djan. Both of the other replaceable designations in these two remarks, namely le fumna and ta, have already been replaced by da and de and therefore stand outside the new matching scheme.
So the speaker may continue:
| (5) | Do pa mercea [mehr-SHEIGH-ah] da | W married (married-became to) X. |
And who is X? The woman once designated by le fumna. And who is W, the "designatum" of (that is, the thing or person designated by) the fourth free variable? Why John, of course. Had the speaker wished to say that it was Pete who married the woman X, he would have said:
| (6) | Di pa mercea da | Z married X. |
For at the time he spoke, di was matched with the name la Pit.
This seems tricky, but you will probably find it easy and natural to assign up to three free variables in this way. It will usually be clear to you when you are listening to or speaking Loglan just which among the five free variables have been used. The rest remain in alphabetical order on their shelf waiting for the speaker to use them. Thus after sentences (3), (4) and (5) the variables da, de and do have been used to replace le fumna, ta and la Djan, respectively. Throughout the rest of this conversation--or the current paragraph in text--these three variables will remain more or less permanently assigned to the objects and persons designated by the original expressions, i.e., to their designata. At the end of utterance (5) only di and du remain unused. These will be ready to be matched to whatever is the last and next-to-last replaceable designation, respectively, at any subsequent moment in the conversation. Experience has shown, however, that even a fourth free variable is rarely used in speech.
Writing is a different matter. With one's text in front of one, not only can all five replacing variables be rapidly assigned, but one can run out of variables fairly fast. When this happens, subscripted variables may be used. These are compounds like dacine [dah-shee-neh], dacito [dah-shee-toh], etc.--these compounds, too, normally get level stress--which are the Loglan equivalents of expressions like English 'X-sub-one', 'X-sub-two', and so on. There are in principle an infinite number of these, of course, so once the writer starts on them, da is not likely to run out of variables again. But the five unsubscripted variables da de di do du will suffice for organizing the references in most ordinary text.4
The personal variables of Loglan are much more numerous than the personal pronouns of English, but they are used in much the same way. The basic words are mi [mee] and tu [too] which, as you may easily guess, mean 'I' (or 'me') and 'you', respectively. Thus:
| (1) | Mi cluva [SHLOO-vah] tu | I love you. |
| (2) | Tu cluva mi | You love me. |
Note that neither of these words is inflected for its position in the sentence. It is as if we said 'Me love you' in English, as, in fact, some children and speakers of Pidgin English do.5
There is no distinction in Loglan between the formal and informal senses of 'you' as there is in French and German. In this respect Loglan is like modern English and unlike nearly all of the other European languages. For almost all these languages still carry this mark of the sharp class-distinctions amongst the people who spoke these languages in the past.6
A third personal variable is mu [moo], a phonemic mixture of mi and tu. Naturally it means 'we' or 'us'. In fact, mu is an abbreviation of the "mixed" argument form mi ze tu ('I and you jointly'), the exact meaning of which we will consider in Section 4.35. For the moment it is enough to know that this is the "proposing" or "planning" sense of English 'we' or 'us', as in the sequence 'Let's go. We'll visit Jack. Then we'll eat.'
There is another sense of the pronoun 'we' in English. For example, the sense of 'we' in the following sentences is not that of mi ze tu: 'John and I went to Spain. We stayed there for a while, and then we went on to Italy.' Obviously I do not mean to include you, my listener, in this "narrative" sense of 'we'. So for precision of reference we have another set of personal variables in Loglan which mean 'X and I', 'Y and I', and so on. These are mia mie mii mio miu [myah myeh myee myoh myoo]. As you may easily infer, these words are abbreviations of the mixed forms mi ze da ('I and X jointly'), mi ze de ('I and Y jointly'), and so on.
Like the free variables, replacement with these mixed variables is determined by order. Thus in translating the English narrative above, we would use mie for 'we' because the name 'John' in 'John and I went to Spain' is the second-to-the-last replaceable designation at the moment the replacement occurred ('Spain' was the last). Note that 'I', being a permanent designation of any speaker, is not replaceable and therefore is not counted in reckoning the replacement order of 'John'. Since all designations made with personal variables are permanent in the passages in which they occur, they are never replaced by free variables.
There is a third, less frequently occurring sense of 'we' in English for which Loglan also provides distinct words. This is the mu ze da sense of 'we': the mixed first, second and third person sense of the pronoun 'we' in 'We (you and I and the children) will visit the Louvre first, then we'll go to Notre Dame, then the Left Bank...' and so on. This is the "group planning" sense of 'we'. So this mixture of references is expressed in Loglan with the mua-series, mua mue mui muo muu [mwah mweh mwee mwoh mwoo]; and mua is, we see, a very compact abbreviation of mi ze tu ze da.
The final series of personal variables is one in which the members have the sense of English plural 'you' when it means a mixture of second and third person references: thus 'you (the listener) and X', 'you and Y', and so on. These abbreviations are of course generated from the mixed argument forms tu ze da, tu ze de, and so on, and are simply tua tue tui tuo tuu [twah tweh twee twoh twoo]. Again the rules of replacement for free variables apply.
The total number of Loglan personal variables is a formidable eighteen. But as fifteen of these come in five-member series, and as all but the primitive elements mi and tu are plain abbreviations of ze-linked phrases, they hardly have to be learned. Once the da-series and mi tu are in hand, then tui will be seen and heard as tu ze di. There is hardly any more to it than that.
With the personal variables we complete our account of the words which function as pronouns in Loglan. In summary, these are (i) the six demonstratives ti ta, toi toa and tio tao, (ii) the five free variables of the da-series da de di do du; and (iii) mi tu mu and their fifteen derivatives. There are many other variables, of course, since Loglan is a heavily mathematized language. The most numerous are the letter variables we will take up in the next section.
Loglan, which frequently uses those compact visual forms beloved by mathematicians, has an unusually large supply of letter variables: the 'a' 'b' 'c' 'd's of the mathematician and logician. Each letter variable is available in two forms, first as a word--in most cases three-letters long, e.g., bei--and second as a single-character written sign, in this case b. The Loglan letter words and letter signs are used exactly as the English number words ('one') and numerals ('1') are used, in that each numeral is a visually compact form of its corresponding word that is used optionally in print or writing. In fact, Loglan letter signs are called "letterals" on the model of the English word 'numeral'.
There are a hundred of these word/letteral pairs in Loglan. There are the 52 words for the 52 Latin letterals, the 26 lower plus the 26 upper case ones. (A and a are different letterals in Loglan, as indeed they are different graphs in English, and so deserve different words by which to speak them.) But there are only 24 three-letter words for the 48 Greek letterals, because the 24 capital letter words are made by prefixing gao- [gow] to the three-letter word for the corresponding lower-case letteral. This is because so few Greek capital letterals differ from the corresponding Latin capitals that there is little use for upper-case Greek letter-words.
The words loglanists use for reading letterals aloud--words like the seldom written but often spoken English 'tee', 'eks', 'eff' and 'cue', and the both written and spoken 'alpha', 'beta' and 'gamma' of Greek--are generated in Loglan by adding -ei [-ay] and -ai [-igh] to the lower and upper case Latin consonant letters, respectively. This generates the series bei cei dei... [bay shay day...] for the lower-case letterals and Bai Cai Dai... [bigh shigh digh...] for the capitals. The Latin vowel words are either the seven vowel letters pronounced according to their sounds, a e i o u w y as [ah eh ee oh oo eu uh], when it isn't important to distinguish them from the connectives a e i o u, and when case and language (Greek or Latin) doesn't matter, or by three-letter words formed by attaching -si and -ma to the vowel letterals when it is. Thus asi esi isi... [ah-see ess-ee ee-see...] are the three-letter words for the lower case Latin vowels, and Ama Ema Ima... [ahm-ah em-ah eem-ah...] represent the capitals. Again, the most typical pronunciation of these disyllables is with level stress.The Loglan words for the Greek letters--words which function like 'alpha', 'beta', 'gamma', and so on, in English--are formed in Loglan by adding the suffix -eo [-eigh-oh] to all the consonants except c because there is no sound in Greek that corresponds to Loglan [sh]. This generates beo deo feo... [beigh-oh deigh-oh feigh-oh...] for the lower-case Greek consonant letter-words. As mentioned above, gao- is added to these three-letter forms to make the occasional Greek capital. Thus gaoseo [gow-seigh-oh] is the word for capital sigma, whose letteral does in fact differ from Latin 'S'. Seo [seigh-oh] of course is lower case sigma. Greek lower-case vowel-words are made in forms parallel to the Latin ones by adding -fi to all the Loglan vowel-sounds except w--like c, Loglan w [eu] is not assigned to any letter in the Greek alphabet--whenever it is useful to distinguish between cases or languages: afi efi ifi... [ah-fee eff-ee ee-fee...]. The words for the Greek capital vowels--on the rare occasions when they are required--are gao,afi gao,efi gao,ifi... [gow-ah-fee gow-eh-fee gow-ee-fee...]. (Note the close-commas. This forces vowel-pairing from the left, and is one of the rare occasions when the "pair-from-the-right" rule mentioned in Section 2.15 is departed from in non-names. Because it is a departure from standard pronunciation, it is marked.)
Remember that each of the 100 three- and six-letter words so generated may be represented in text in two ways: first, as a phonemically spelled word--Tai, for example, which translates the phrase 'capital tee' in English--and second, by its single-letter abbreviation, in this case the letteral T. Both representations are pronounced as the word itself is spelled, in the case of T and Tai as [tigh]. Thus the two differently written sentences:
| (1) | Tai ditca [DEET-shah] | Tee is a teacher (unusual in English text, but understandable). |
| (2) | T ditca | T is a teacher. |
are read aloud as the same utterance. This is exactly what we do when reading numerals aloud in English, of course. Thus 'He ate 3 doughnuts' and 'He ate three doughnuts' evoke exactly the same sounds.
A common use of letter variables in Loglan is to shorten longer designations, often as an alternative to using the replacing variables described in Section 4.4.7 Thus T in (2) might well have been an abbreviation of the longer designation la Tam in
| (3) | La Tam, merji le kicmu [KEESH-moo] | Tom is married to the doctor. |
(La is the Loglan name operator, and le is a "descriptor" like English 'the'. These are operations which we will consider more carefully in the next two sections.) Thus we could rewrite (3) as
| (4) | Tai merji le kicmu | Tee is married to the doctor. |
Conventionally, upper case letter variables are used to abbreviate names, while lower case ones are used to abbreviate predicates used as designations, as kicmu is used in le kicmu. Thus (4) could be further shortened by using a second letter word--this time a lower case one--to abbreviate le kicmu:
| (5) | Tai merji kei | Tee is married to kay. |
or even to
| (6) | T merji k | T is married to k. |
in text.
The text is now in the maximally condensed visual form we see in mathematics books. But the sentences of (6) are pronounced exactly like those of (5)...in both languages. Note that the case information in the Loglan letter words is not conveyed in the spoken English ones. That is to say, we do not say 'Capital tee is married to lower-case kay' in English. In effect, we do in Loglan...thus doubling our kit of speakable letter variables.
The mathematized style of Loglan is still being explored. At the moment, using letter variables is neither more nor less admired than using the replacing variables of Section 4.4, which, although more difficult to keep track of, seem somehow to be more natural. Which system of third person pronouns will be preferred in what contexts remains to be seen. Perhaps both systems will have permanent roles.
In replacing a longer designation with a letter word, the Latin letter is used first. The Greek one is used only after the corresponding Latin letter has been assigned. For example, to abbreviate the designations in,
| (7) | Le kicmu pa furvea [foor-VEIGH-ah] le ketpi le ditca | The doctor bought (2nd converse of sold) the ticket from the teacher. |
we use kei for the first k-initial predicate, keo for the second, and dei for the d-initial one. Rewriting (7) with those letter words we get:
| (8) | Kei pa furvea keo dei | Kay bought kappa from dee. |
If text is to be printed, and if the fonts available to the printer include Greek letterals as well as Latin ones, then the following even more abbreviated textual form is possible:
| (9) | k pa furvea d | k bought from d. |
Greek letterals have, of course, been routinely used in science and mathematics for several centuries. As the century of the computer unfolds, the use of such fonts in ordinary home-generated text may well spread to non-mathematical domains.
We must now make explicit a convention that we have used informally for some time. That convention is that when names are used as designations in Loglan, they are preceded by the little word la [lah]. For example, the presence and absence of la is the only difference between the following two sentences:
| (1) | La Djan, godzi | John goes. |
| (2) | Djan, godzi | John, go! |
In sentence (1), the name operator la has made a designation out of the name-word Djan which follows it. That is, La Djan refers to something, namely to a person named John. Since it refers to something, it is an argument, namely the first argument of the predicate godzi. Therefore the sentence as a whole is a statement; it claims something to be true of John, namely that he goes.
In sentence (2), however, the name-word Djan is used vocatively, that is, used to call the attention of someone named John. This leaves the predicate godzi without a first argument; and, as we will see in detail later, a sentence whose predicate does not have a first argument is not a statement but an imperative. It forms the injunction 'Go!'. Evidently the presence or absence of the little word la makes some difference in Loglan.
The distinction between the designative and the vocative use of names is not regularly drawn in the natural languages. And yet there is a very important difference in meaning. People designate someone by using da's name in much the same spirit that they describe someone by using some predicate that fits da. Thus we may designate someone by saying 'He's the fat one over there' or by saying 'He's the one named John over there.' Thus having a name is a kind of property, namely the property shared by all who have that name. We use this property in using names to make designations. We say, in effect, 'the one named John'.
This is exactly what the name-operator la does in Loglan. In sentence (1) La Djan means literally 'The one person I mean whose name is John'. This is a mouthful, and no one would ever translate Loglan into English in this way. But English is not explicit about these matters. Loglan is. It perhaps expresses the sense of the Loglan best to write sentences like (1) as 'The John goes' whenever a literal translation is desired. Again, this is not a routine one would care to impose on unwarned ears. But it does suggest, as 'John goes' does not, the sense in which the Loglan sentence, but not the English, explicitly recognizes that there are many Johns.
Just as names may be used to form designations, so may predicates. Thus the little word le [leh] operates on predicate expressions to make designations out of them in a way that is similar to the way la operates on name-words. We will call the designations made with le descriptions, and le itself, the descriptive operator. For in this context we are using predicates, not to say things about the world, but to locate those things in the world about which we have something to say. Thus with la we locate things by naming them; with le we locate things by imputing other properties to them. For example, in
| (1) | Le fumna pa cluva le mrenu | The woman loved the man. |
the predicate words fumna and mrenu are not predications, for they claim nothing. Instead, they function in this sentence to help the listener locate the two objects in the world about which the speaker does have something to say, namely that one of them loved the other. Thus, descriptions are not true or false of the things they describe, but merely helpful or not helpful. This can best be seen by considering a fanciful example.
Suppose someone who looks like a woman is arrested by two detectives on suspicion of some crime. Later the suspect is more thoroughly examined and found to be a man. Suppose the first detective reports this fact to the second by saying 'That woman was a man.' Is this a contradiction? Certainly not. For by describing the suspect as 'that woman' the first detective has not said that the suspect is in fact a woman. It is not the linguistic business of designation to assert facts, but to use facts, or apparent facts, to help listeners locate individuals. The fact is that the suspect looked like a woman. And that fact is useful in locating him.
For we can now ask a very different kind of question. Was it useful to the listener to have the suspect described to de as 'that woman'? Certainly. For this is exactly what de needed to know in order to locate the person who was in fact a man. Suppose the second detective had been told 'That man was a man.' Would this have been useful to de? We suppose not. We suppose, in fact, that nothing would have been more misleading to that as yet uninformed listener. For it is worse than useless to be told to locate an object by means of a property you think that object does not have!
Notice that the sentences 'That woman was a man' and 'That man was a man' are both true under the circumstances we have assumed. But only one of them has any chance of communicating that truth to the listener; and that is the one that uses a "false" but useful description as the designation of the individual the sentence is about.
But, however these matters may be interpreted in English, the sentence
| (2) | Le fumna pa mrenu | The woman was a man. |
is not a contradiction in Loglan. The reason is that the descriptive operator le does not simply mean 'the', or 'the one that is', but more exactly 'the one thing, or set of things, which I intend to designate with this phrase and which is apparently a...'. Thus there are many women, and many things which look like women, but the speaker of sentence (2) intends to designate just one of them, and a certain one of them, when da says that it was a man. That one intended thing is the reference of the descriptive phrase. And the sentence containing that phrase is true or false depending only on whether its predicate, not its description, is true of that intended thing.8
Now any untensed and unspecified predicate expression of the language can become the basis of a description with le. Thus the predicate expression bilti cmalo ge nirli ckela provides the description
| (3) | Le bilti cmalo ge nirli ckela | The (thing that is) beautifully small for a girl's school. |
and nirli ckela go bilti ce cmalo provides the basis for another slightly different description:
| (4) | Le nirli ckela go bilti ce cmalo | The girls' school that is beautiful and small. |
Similarly, the verbal notion of the predicate kukra sucmi [SOOSH-mee] ('quickly swims') becomes a noun-like notion in the description:
| (5) | Le kukra sucmi | The fast swimmer. |
And the adjectival notion of the predicate mutce [MOOT-sheh] blanu ('is very blue') becomes a noun-like one in the description:
| (6) | Le mutce blanu | The very blue thing. |
In short, one must occasionally make rather radical adjustments to the English in transporting a predicate notion into or out of a Loglan description. But so long as the Loglan predicate expression is (i) untensed and (ii) unspecified, no grammatical adjustment whatever is needed to make a Loglan description out of a Loglan predicate, or vice versa. In later sections we will take up the adjustments that are necessary just in case the descriptive predicate is specified or tensed.
In Chapter 3 we observed that predicate strings with "kekked head predas" were not allowed in predicate expressions but were permitted in descriptions. It is easy to see why. A predicate expression with a kekked head preda is impossible to say because the listener will always take it for a kekked predicate expression. Thus, the speaker of
(7) Da ke gudbi ki sadji mrenu
may intend it to be understood as
(7') *Da [(ke gudbi ki sadji) mrenu]9
but nobody will parse it that way (and so I have starred it). Instead everyone will hear it as
(7") Da [ka gudbi ki (sadji mrenu)]
But no problem arises with kekked head predas in descriptions:
| (8) | Le ke gudbi ki sadji mrenu pa hijri | The both good and wise man was here. |
The reason this sense is unequivocal in descriptions and not in predications is that kekked whole predicate expressions may not be made the basis of descriptions. Thus there is no rule in the machine's grammar that allows kekked predicates to be operands of descriptors. In descriptions, therefore, the scope of a kek is always the next pair of individual words, or the next pair of expressions that may replace individual words. Thus, in the case in hand, the parser will hear (8) unequivocally as
(8') (le [[ke gudbi ki sadji> mrenu]) (pa hijri)
and now
(8") *(le [ke gudbi ki [sadji mrenu>]) (pa hijri)
will be impossible for it to hear.10
Suppose we say in English 'Butter is soft' 'Water is wet' and 'Man is in trouble.' Are the words 'Butter', 'Water' and 'Man' descriptions? In a sense they are, for they use predicates (in the Loglan sense) to help us locate--or think about, for such objects are mighty hard to locate--the peculiar objects they do designate. And what are these objects? Well, if you think about it, anyone who talks like this in English is talking about all the butter there is, all the water there is, and all the human beings there are, for this is the sense of the English noun when it is used without an article. (Contrast 'The man is in trouble.') But is this a legitimate way of talking? Perhaps; but it is certainly a different way than talking about pieces of butter, glasses of water, or individual human beings.
In Loglan we recognize this important difference explicitly by providing a different operator lo [loh] to form these mass descriptions, as we will now call them. (To English-listening ears [loh] has a very abrupt, even truncated sound. It is not, for example, the sound of English 'low' [loh-oo].) Let us consider some examples.
The Loglan predicate batra means 'is a piece, portion or lump of butter'. The predicate cutri means 'is a drop, portion, body or expanse of water'. The predicate humni means 'is a human being'. Thus le batra, le cutri and le humni designate the particular lump of butter, the particular drop (let us say) of water, and the particular particle of humanity which the speaker has in mind. But lo batra, lo cutri and lo humni designate just what the English words 'butter', 'water' and 'man' designate when used without articles, namely those three massive, widely distributed but discontinuous individuals composed respectively of all the butter, all the water, and all the human beings there are. Looking back, we will now call descriptions made with le particular descriptions, to contrast them with the mass descriptions with which we are now concerned.
English permits us to talk of these massive individuals in a wide variety of ways. In the case of what some grammarians call the "uncountable" nouns--substance words like 'butter', 'sand', 'wood', 'meat', 'iron', etc.--the procedure is very simple. One simply uses the unadorned noun, as in 'Iron is hard.' What is awkward in the case of these nouns is talking about individual pieces. For one must say in English 'The piece (lump, fragment, chunk) of iron', not simply le fernu ('the iron-thing') as one can in Loglan. For other nouns--the "countable" English nouns like 'book', 'chair', 'spoon', etc.--we sometimes use the plural to express this massively constructed individual ('Books are important to man'), and sometimes the singular with the definite article ('The lion is found all over Africa'). It is usually obvious from the context that the speaker does not mean to talk about all or any books or lions as individual particles. Thus it is not the case that every book is important to humankind, and it is certainly not true that any particular lion is found all over Africa. It is the mass individual Felis leo who has spread his tawny presence over Africa. But the trouble with these English designations is that they are not very distinctive. Thus with the same grammatical constructions one can also designate quite particular things or sets of things ('The lion roared', 'Books were on the table'). The English listener must, as usual, guess from context what kind of creature the speaker has in mind...although we are so used to doing this in English that it does not seem to us to be a very difficult thing to do.
In Loglan a distinct grammatical form exists for each of these distinct mechanisms of designation. There can be no doubt that the Loglan speaker who says lo simba is designating lion-kind, and that lo bukcu means that massive individual composed of all the books there are or have been or ever will be. For there is no restriction in Loglan on the kind of predicate to which the lo operator may be applied. Even the most countable things can be massified, and the most uncountable things particularized; for Loglan does not divide the world up in this way.
Before we leave mass descriptions it is worth pointing out that the languages of some preliterate peoples apparently employ the idea of mass description as the elementary meaning of their basic predicate words. Thus the Trobriand Islanders are reported to place this interpretation on all their nouns; whence the curious world-view arises that what we Indo-Europeans would call a single instance of a thing is, to them, nothing but a part, or reappearance, or manifestation of the same, massive individual thing. Thus every rabbit is just another appearance of Mr. Rabbit; every yam just another manifestation of Mr. Yam; every baby just a part of Mr. Baby all over again. I don't know if many Trobrianders will learn Loglan, but if they do they will find an apparatus readily available in it with which to describe the world exactly as they see it. And the lo-operator will be as common in their speech as le will be in yours and mine.11
In the last three sections we have discussed three very similar ways of forming designations in Loglan: (i) naming with la, (ii) describing particular things with le, and (iii) describing masses of things with lo. There is a fourth kind of designation, namely description by quotation; and for this we will need the marks li...lu [lee...loo], liu [lee-oo] and lie [lee-EH], the second syllable in the last word being nearly always stressed.
Not only are all punctuation marks spoken words in Loglan, as we have observed before, but the affinities of quotation marks with the other descriptive operators of Loglan is phonemically clear. Thus the very sound of the word li suggests that it is related to the descriptors la, le and lo, all in some sense meaning 'the'. And so it is. For just as le means 'the one I mean that is...', and la means 'the one I mean named...', so li means 'the thing I mean that looks or sounds like...'. Thus quotation is really description by imitation.
| (1) | Li, Kristobal Kolo'n, lu logla namci la Kristobal Kolo'n | 'Kristobal Kolo'n' is the Loglan name of Christopher Columbus. |
In (1) the speaker has imitated a portion of Loglan speech or writing--perhaps copied it from a book--and put the imitation between the marks li, and , lu in order to quote it. Note that pauses--represented as usual by commas in text--are also required around the quoted string. This style of quotation is called weak quotation. With it any string of well-formed Loglan may be unambiguously quoted.
But sometimes we wish to quote ill-formed strings...including some that might have an extra lu in it, which would baffle the machine. Even foreign utterances, in which there's no predicting how many stray lu's there might be, also need to be quoted. For these two occasions Loglan has a more robust style of quotation called strong quotation. This is done with lie X, ..., X, in which the repeated boundary marker X is any arbitrary Loglan word, usually a letter word, that does not occur within the quoted string. For example,
| (2) | Lie gei, Christopher Columbus, gei gleca namci la Kristobal Kolo'n | 'Christopher Columbus' is the English name of Christopher Columbus. |
Here gei (g) has been chosen as the repeated letter-word because the quoted string is an expression of English (gleca [GLEH-shah]) and because the sounds [gay] of gei do not occur in it. If we had quoted the Spanish (spana) name of Christopher Columbus, or the German (dotca) one, we could have used sei or dei because neither [say] nor [day] occur in it as well. For example,
| (3) | Lie sei, Cristobal Colo'n, sei spana namci la Kristobal Kolo'n | 'Cristobal Colon' is the Spanish name of Christopher Columbus. |
The second and fourth pauses are optional; the ones before and after sei are required to make strong quotation work.12
Note that the argument la Kristobal Kolo'n designates a once-living person, while the arguments Li, Kristobal Kolo'n, lu; Lie gei, Christopher Columbus, gei; and Lie sei, Cristobal Colo'n, sei all designate portions of human speech, namely a Loglan, an English, and a Spanish name. Kristobal Kolo'n, 'Cristobal Colo'n' and 'Christopher Columbus' are different names; but they name the same person, namely Cristobal Colo'n.
Weak quotation with li and lu is used much as ordinary quotation marks are used in written English. The chief difference is that in Loglan they are spoken words. In fact li and lu are used exactly as the words 'quote' and 'end quote' are used in certain styles of spoken English, especially the style that is invoked when the speaker wishes to be very certain that someone else's words are not mistaken for his own.13 In Loglan the motivation of the speaker's use of li and lu is logical, and hence less circumstantial. For there is a difference between the name of a thing and that thing. This difference is fundamental in a logical language. So quotation marks are never omitted in Loglan even when their presence might be thought to be assumed. Thus, of the two sentences,
| (4) | Liu Djan, corta purda | 'John' is a short word. |
| (5) | La Djan, corta purda | John is a short word. |
only one is true if, as we assume, John is not a word of any length but a man. Here liu (a blend of li and lu) is the single word quotation operator and may always be translated 'The word '...''. Liu may only be used with confidence on Loglan words.14
In spoken English all these clarifying marks are commonly left out. The usual form of the sentence which means (4) is spoken exactly as it would be spoken if the speaker had meant (5). We rely on the "good sense" of the listener not to infer that the speaker actually meant (5). Again, the interpretation of English depends on context. Loglan does not. In Loglan we wish to be able to speak nonsense when we want to.15 Thus (4) and (5) in Loglan are invariably distinct forms.
In some forms of written Loglan the words li and lu may be replaced by their signs '«' and '»'.16 So written, (1) becomes:
(6) «Kristobal Kolon» logla namci la Kristobal Kolon
But, as always, such signs are pronounced as words in speech.
Summarizing, there are three kinds of quotation words in Loglan: (i) ordinary or weak quotation with li...lu; (ii) single word quotation with liu; and (iii) strong quotation with lie X...X. In the latter X is any exactly repeated boundary marker that does not occur in the quoted string. When convenient X may be the letter word for the initial letter of the Loglan predicate for the language of the quoted string. Strong quotation can handle any kind of quoted string including nonsense and non-Loglan.
We are now ready to deal with the abstract entities we left hanging in Chapter 3. You may recall that the abstract operators po, pu and zo which we discussed in that chapter permitted us to form predicate expressions like pu gudbi which meant '...is a property of being good', but that "goodness-in-general", or what we there called "virtue", was still beyond us at that time. But we are now ready for 'virtue'. Surprisingly, it is a mass term. For it is used exactly like the word 'butter' is used in English and evidently designates the mass individual manifested in all the particular instances of virtue that there are. Consequently, the Loglan designation that translates this word is made with the compound operator lopu, which is lo + pu and usually pronounced [loh-poo]; and 'virtue' in Loglan is lopu gudbi /lopuGUDbi/, or the mass composed of all the properties of anyone's or anything's being good that there are. Similarly, we would expect lopo gudbi to be used when the mass individual was to be composed of all the acts, states or events of goodness that there are, and to be best translated into English by 'goodness'. Finally, we would expect lozo gudbi to be used when the mass individual was to be composed of all the measurable quantities of goodness that there are, the latter being translatable by no English word or simple phrase because no such concept is readily available to speakers of English. To translate lozo preda we have to use a circumlocution...as I just have.
Note that some of the constructions we are now encountering are more complex in Loglan than they are in English. And rightly so. For the ideas that underlie them are in fact complex. Because they seem very simple in English, words like 'virtue', 'courage', 'weight', and 'length' are logically very troublesome to our English-thinking minds. Where are these individuals? What does it mean to "love" virtue, or to "have" weight? In Loglan it is plain that these individuals are complex creations of the human mind.17 To love lopu gudbi is to love a massive, discontinuous, widely distributed individual composed of all the instances of just that property by which all the phenomena that ever exhibit it may be said to be good. That is possible...in Loglan as well as in English. But in Loglan it is obvious that it is a very different enterprise than loving John.
On the other hand, some uses of abstract words in English obscure some very simple ideas. For example, to "have weight" is simply to weigh something, and no abstract entity is involved in doing that. Thus the abstract creature we call 'weight' is lopu tidjo in Loglan; for in more explicit English, weight is all the heaviness there is. But to say that X "has weight" is simply to say
| (1) | Da tidjo | X is heavier than (something). |
which doesn't involve abstraction at all. Thus the Loglan speaker is usually not inclined to speak in this unnecessarily abstract English way. Even so, da could translate such English expressions literally if da wished to. Here is one way to do it:
| (2) | Da katli lopu tidjo | X has (is characterized by) Mr. Heaviness. |
Talking abstractly about things that can be talked about concretely is not a very satisfactory procedure in any language. On the other hand people do have genuine attitudes toward abstract things, if only because the structure of their language tempts them to see the world in an abstract way. Thus to say
| (3) | La Djan, cluva lopo sucmi | John loves swimming. |
is a perfectly sensible thing to do in English, though a curious one in Loglan. But presumably in both languages what John loves is just this abstract, massively distributed thing composed of all the events of swimming that there are. (Notice that we are now using the event-operator po.) But if what John really loves is his swimming, then in Loglan we would say so:
| (4) | Da cluva lopo da sucmi | He loves the mass of all events composed of his swimming. |
In pidgin-style English, 'X love mass-event X swim.' Similarly, to love the color blue, as in
| (5) | Da cluva lopu blanu | X loves blue. |
is easier to do in English than in Loglan. For the word 'blue' functions in such English sentences as if it were a proper name (e.g., 'X loves Mary'). But it is possible to love blue even in Loglan. It may be a little more troublesome to do so, for it is necessary to perform two distinct grammatical operations on the naked predicate blanu with which the Loglan mind begins. Even so, such designations can be formed.
We may expect, therefore, that our customary European attitudes toward abstract entities will survive in Loglan, but with a finer set of discriminations than we are used to in English. For if you're going to love virtue in Loglan you must first decide whether it is the mass of all goodnesses that you love, or all states of being good, or all quantities of goodness, or, a little more concretely, the mass of all good things. Thus
| (6) | Mi cluva lopu gudbi | I love the property that good things have. |
| (7) | Mi cluva lopo gudbi | I love good states-of-affairs. |
| (8) | Mi cluva lozo gudbi | I love all the quantities of goodness in good things. |
| (9) | Mi cluva lo gudbi | I love good things. |
are your choices. For each might be said to be a legitimate translation of 'I love virtue' into Loglan. Again we see that Loglan embraces English but exceeds it, and in ways that will probably lead to greater awareness of the nature of abstraction than is usual among speakers of English. For if a thing is an abstract entity and not a concrete one, it will be obvious in Loglan that it is, and in just what ways. We suppose there will be some advantage in this arrangement for the thinker.18
We can now go back to deal with a matter that we left unsettled at the end of Section 4.8. In that section we dealt with particular descriptions formed with le, and we concluded by saying that any untensed and unspecified predicate expression of the language could be made the basis of a description with le without adjusting it in any way. Mass descriptions with lo, we later implied, could be constructed from predicates selected from the same broad domain. But now suppose we do want to form a description with a specified predicate, that is, with a predicate that has one or more of its arguments shown. Suppose, for example, we want to use the specified predicate farfu la Rabrt, as it might occur in the sentence Da farfu la Rabrt ('X is the father of Robert') as the basis of a description. That is, we wish to designate someone who is--or is locatable as--the father of Robert. What adjustment must we make, and why?
First let us see what happens if we try to describe the father of Robert in the usual way. Suppose we simply precede the predicate expression farfu la Rabrt with le as follows:
| (1) | Le farfu la Rabrt | ??? |
But what have we designated? Not one thing, but two. For if we now try to use the string we formed in (1) as an argument of some multi-place predicate, for example with the predicate godzi ('...goes to...from...') as below,
(2) Da pa godzi le farfu la Rabrt
we then see that the single designation we thought we had formed breaks up immediately into two: le farfu and la Rabrt. In (2) we hoped to say the X went to the father of Robert; instead what we actually said was that X went to the father from Robert. For Robert has changed allegiance. No longer is he the father's son; he is now the point of departure from which X went.
To avoid this kind of confusion, Loglan uses two little linking words to attach the arguments of specified descriptions to the main descriptive term. Je [zheh] is the first of these and links second arguments to descriptions. Thus what we failed to say in (2) we may now say by using je:
| (3) | Da pa godzi le farfu je la Rabrt | X went to the-father-of-Robert. |
It is as if we had hyphenated the whole phrase. For le farfu je la Rabrt now functions everywhere as a single term. To attach two specifying arguments to a description, we use je and the second linking operator jue [zhweh] as follows:
| (4) | Da pa godzi le farfu je la Rabrt, jue la Meris | X went to the-father-of-Robert-by-Mary. |
and je and jue now hold the entire description le farfu je la Rabrt jue la Meris together. And to attach three or more arguments to a description, we use je first, and then as many instances of jue as we require:
| (5) | Da pa godzi le vedma je le horma jue la Djan, jue lo nema dalri | X went to the-seller-of-the-horse-to-John- for-the-hundred-dollars. |
I have hyphenated the whole English phrase starting with 'the-seller-' and ending with '-dollars' to show that the Loglan construction is similarly linked by its je's and jue's into a single term. Jue is the general link for all arguments in third or higher places of a descriptive predicate. (The word nema, by the way, is a number word meaning 'one hundred'.)
Now a world of English ambiguities is avoided by this device. For though the number of English prepositions is very large, they do not work as effectively in keeping descriptive meanings straight as the pair of Loglan linking words je and jue.
For example, suppose I say in English 'I talked to the teacher of many things.' What do I mean? That we talked about many things? Or that the teacher taught many subjects? In English, one cannot be sure. In Loglan, one cannot be in doubt. The little word ro means 'many'; and the predicate bekti is the general word for 'thing'. The predicate takna means '...talks to...about...'. Therefore, the two possible interpretations of the English sentence can be said unequivocally in Loglan in these two ways:
| (6) | Mi pa takna le ditca ro bekti | I talked to the teacher about many things. |
| (7) | Mi pa takna le ditca je ro bekti | I talked to the teacher-of-many-things. |
(Both pauses are phrasing pauses.) The difference, of course, is the presence in (7), and the absence in (6), of the linking operator je. Accordingly, the phrase le ditca ro bekti in (6) represents two arguments, the second and third arguments respectively of the predicate takna ('...talks to...about...'). While in (7) the linked phrase le ditca je ro bekti ('the teacher of many things') functions as a single argument, namely as the second argument of that same predicate. What could be clearer? A little experimentation with the linking operators will show that they settle nearly all prepositional ambiguities of this kind. For example:
| (8) | Le furvea je le kamla je la Romas | The buyer of the thing that comes from Rome. |
| (9) | Le furvea je le kamla jue la Romas | The buyer of the thing that comes...from Rome (as the seller). |
Here English 'from' does not succeed in distinguishing the two ways in which Rome is linked in these descriptions, despite the pause that we hopefully introduce in (9). In Loglan, however, the difference between je and jue clearly shows that la Romas is the second argument of kamla in (8), that is, a place of origin, and the third argument of furvea in (9), that is, the seller of whatever came. This is tricky...but in English, not in Loglan.
Incidentally, mass descriptions may also be specified. But to do so may severely limit the extent of their "massiveness". Thus, when unspecified, the description lo farfu designates a massive object with many parts (as in 'Fathers of the world unite'). But should we now specify the predicate farfu, as in lo farfu je la Rabrt, we would find that the corporate entity we have now designated (as in 'Fathers of Robert unite') is exactly the same entity as the single person we might have designated with le farfu je la Rabrt. But again it is a matter of biology, not grammar, that people have only one father. So the distinction between le farfu je la Rabrt and lo farfu je la Rabrt exists to tease the fancy, if not the factual mind.
There is one variety of specified description that deserves and gets special treatment in Loglan. This is the specified abstract description formed with a compound operator made by joining any descriptive operator to po, pu or zo. The most widely used form of this construction is called event description and is made with the compound operator lepo (typically pronounced [leh-poh] with level stress), a word that may always be translated 'the event, state or condition of...'. Thus the unspecified description lepo sucmi means 'the particular event of swimming which I have in mind', or simply 'the swim'. Similarly, lepo prano means 'the run', and lepo mrenu means 'the manhood (of some particular person)'. Obviously we shall sometimes want to specify such predicates as richly as we can. For we shall often want to anticipate such questions as: Whose manhood? Who ran? And where did he run?
Now the special treatment consists in this. Where the specification of concrete descriptions is limited to the second and higher order arguments of a predicate (le farfu je la Djan), the specification of abstract predicates may include the mention of first arguments as well. Thus we say
| (1) | Lepo da sucmi | The event of X's swimming, that is, X's swim. |
| (2) | Lepo da mrenu | The state of X's being a man, that is, X's manhood. |
as well as the more abundantly specified forms
| (3) | Lepo da prano de di | The event of X's running to Y from Z. |
| (4) | Lepo la Djan, pa traci la Espanias, la Frans | John's trip (i.e., the event of his travelling) to Spain from France. |
We now observe that the constructions which form the basis of these descriptions are not simply predicate expressions, but whole sentences: Da sucmi; Da mrenu; Da prano de di; and La Djan, pa traci la Espanias, la Frans. Obviously this is a very flexible form. Notice something else. The specified arguments in (3) and (4) evidently do not require the linking operators je and jue which we learned to use in specifying descriptions in the previous section. Why is this?
The reason is that event descriptions are formed, not with predicate expressions, but with what we may usefully think of as whole sentences. The sentence may be incomplete, even totally without arguments, as in lepo sucmi, or it may be complete with all possible arguments mentioned, as in lepo da sucmi de di do ('the event of X's swimming to Y from Z by route W'); but any sentence whatever may be used to form an event description with the phrase lepo. Special punctuation rules we will study later guard this construction against ambiguity.19
We sense immediately how convenient this new form is. For we now have a form in which any conceivable event, state or condition, whether actual or imaginary, may be easily designated simply by preceding any sentence which asserts it with the phrase lepo. One consequence of this way of designating events is that imaginary states of affairs may be designated without asserting their existence. Thus with event descriptions we can talk about the events which people fear, hope or expect, or the states of affairs in which they believe, whether these events or states are ever realized or not. As usual we can do so in a more straightforward way than is possible in English.
In English we say 'John believes that it will rain.' But what is it in which John believes? English grammarians call this kind of thing "indirect discourse", suggesting that there is a sentence somewhere which the speaker does not bother to quote directly but in the truth of which da is saying John believes. But this is not a very satisfactory account of the meaning of this clause. Suppose there is no sentence. Suppose John goes to the window, looks at the sky, gets his raincoat, and goes out. Observing this, we may say with some confidence 'John believes that it will rain.' But the object we are designating with the phrase 'that it will rain' is certainly not discourse of any kind.
In Loglan, we say
| (5) | La Djan, krido lepo fa crina [SHREE-nah] | John believes that the event of raining will happen. |
For we suppose that what is related to believers by predicates of this kind are events or states-of-affairs, and not sentences at all. Thus we may also say:
| (6) | Da pa spopa lepo de fa kamla | X hoped that Y would come (that is, that the event of Y's coming will happen). |
| (7) | Mi djano lepo la Ter, bamfoa [bahm-FOH-ah] | I know that the Earth is round (ball-form), that is, that the state of the Earth's being round obtains. |
All Loglan predicates which express the ideas of English 'know', 'believe', 'hope', 'fear', 'expect', 'want', 'wish', and the like, may take event-descriptions as arguments in Loglan.20
But suppose we want to say that someone believes in the truth of an actual sentence. Can we do so? Of course; but by the same kind of precise construction that is required to make this unusual claim in English:
| (8) | Mi djano lepo li, La Ter, bamfoa, lu tradu | I know that 'The Earth is round' is true. |
In Chapter 5, on utterance forms, we will see how event-descriptions figure importantly in the construction of subordinate clauses. But for the moment we will deal with them as if they were simply another kind of Loglan argument form.
We now consider what happens to a description when it occupies the first place of an unadorned predicate. For example, suppose we wish to say that some particular wise person is a man in the same time-free sense that we already know how to say that X is a man, namely
| (1) | Da mrenu | X is a man. |
If now we wish to substitute the description Le sadji ('the wise one') for Da in (1), we get:
| (2) | Le sadji mrenu | ??? |
Does this mean what we intend? Or does it mean 'the wise man', which is not a sentence at all (it claims nothing) but a more elaborate description? Obviously the expression Le sadji mrenu will be interpreted as a description no matter what we intend. It is clear that we have uncovered a major source of ambiguity were no special provision made to prevent such--evidently futile--intentions from arising. That special rule is that whenever a predicate word is the last word to appear before an unadorned predicate expression, then we use the marker word ga in the position of the tense operator to mark the point at which the description ends and the predicate expression begins:
| (3) | Le sadji ga mrenu | The wise one is a man. |
This is an awkward rule;21 but it preserves the economy of such expressions as Da mrenu and La Djan mrenu which require no marker word. It is the price we willingly pay for the logical advantage that all predicate words in Loglan belong to a single part of speech.22
We can now consider several other varieties of description. In Section 4.8, where we first talked about description, we said that only untensed predicate expressions could become the basis of descriptions. This seems arbitrary. Suppose we do want to add a time particular to some description, as in 'the present king of England'. Can we do this in Loglan? Of course; but it turns out to be more parsimonious, grammatically, to generate a set of tensed descriptors--such as lena [leh-nah] ('the present'), lepa [leh-pah] ('the-former') and lefa [leh-fah] ('the-future')--to do this work, rather than permitting tense operators to occur within descriptively used predicates. But with these modified descriptors one may make tensed descriptions in Loglan after all:
| (1) | Lena bragai [BRAH-gigh] je la Inglynd [EENG-gluhnd] | The present king (born-ruler) of England. |
| (2) | Lepa ditca | The former teacher. |
| (3) | Lefa matma | The future mother. |
and even tensed mass descriptions as in
| (4) | Lofa humni | Future humanity. |
| (5) | Lona simba | Present lionkind. |
Notice that when a stressed syllable precedes a predicate word it must be separated from the predicate by a pause. As noted in Chapter 2, this is a general rule. No stressed syllable may pauselessly precede a predicate.
Perhaps more important for translating English than the tensed descriptors, however, are the spatially particularized descriptors formed with vi and va. As we saw in the chapter on predicates, these two little words mean 'here' and 'there', and are used in many ways as tense operators are used in Loglan. Like tense operators, they may be combined with either le or lo to form just those demonstrative descriptions which we would translate into English with 'this' and 'that', as in the sentences below:
| (6) | Levi bukcu ga redro | This book (i.e., the-here book) is red. |
| (7) | Leva fumna ga mrenu | The-there woman is a man. (That woman is a man.) |
and even:
| (8) | Lovi cutri ga kofhatro [kohf-HAHT-roh] | The (mass of) here water is warm (comfortably-hot). (The water here is warm.) |
The distinction between lovi cutri and levi cutri ('the mass of all the water here' and 'this particular puddle of water here') will not seem immediately useful to the English mind. For the noun 'water' seems incorrigibly masslike in English and the adjective 'this' in the phrase 'this water' does little to particularize it. But the Loglan mind starts with integral bits and pieces of water and will therefore be tempted to use lo cutri and lovi cutri only when some synthesis of these elementary bits and pieces is intended. In short, to use this apparatus intelligently we shall have to think about the distinction between le and lo in a Loglan way.23 The distinction between these operators arises, of course, from the fact that every Loglan predicate is a general term. Thus while the Loglan mind starts with pieces of water and bits of better-than, it can be carried by abstraction and mass description to whatever lofty abstractions of "waterness" and virtue we Indo-European thinkers might require. And by the operations of specifying predicates, or tensing them or locating them, we can stop anywhere we like along the way. Thus with lovi cutri we pause to glance at the local mass of water on our way.
The mechanism of "possession" in language ('my hat', 'your mother', 'John's book', etc.) is a widely misunderstood phenomenon. It is unfortunate that the grammarians who first studied it called it "possession", for usually the relationship it specifies has nothing to do with possessing things at all. Thus, in English I can talk of my son's clothes (which he doesn't really own any more than I own him), of your mother (whom you certainly don't own), of my skin (which is simply attached to me) or even of his corner of the room (which is where he is). Thus a huge variety of predicate relations is evidently hidden in these slippery little "possessive" words.
Even so, if we are to translate from the natural languages, we need the "possessive" descriptors, for they provide a useful kind of brevity. But let us be clear about what they are abbreviations of. If you think about it, you will see that when you say 'my hat' you are designating it; and you are doing so by implying that it is a hat that is related in some way to you. You may have several, but this is the one you mean. Moreover, your designation is a description. It utilizes the predicate 'is a hat' in a perfectly regular way. It also uses another fact about that hat in a second but implicit description, namely that it is related somehow to you. Probably the essence of your relation to your hat is that you are the only one who uses it. But whatever that relation is, it is not explicitly predicated in your designation 'my hat'. Thus you have used two properties of your hat to describe it: one explicitly (that it's a hat), the other implicitly (that it is related somehow--you haven't said how--to you).
In English none of this is clear. It can be found out by analysis, of course, for we have found it out in English. But the semantic structure of the English possessive pronouns cannot be seen either in their word forms or in their grammatical inflections in that language. Here is a sentence with a Loglan possessive form:
| (1) | Lemi bukcu ga blanu | My book is blue. |
The first thing we make clear is that the expression lemi bukcu is a description ('the-me book'). For it involves the descriptive operator le in a most obvious way. Secondly, by using bukcu in lemi bukcu just as we use it in le bukcu, we also make clear that the predicate bukcu is the basis of this description, too. Whatever additional properties it may have, the thing we intend you to look for is at least a book. Thirdly, the auxiliary role of the word mi in the descriptive operator lemi suggests to the listener--on the model of levi and lena--that an abbreviation of something else is afoot. It is. That something else is that I am related somehow to the designated thing. Thus, look for it in my hand, on my desk, or where I left it. And that is all. You must not expect me to furnish the deed.24
With lemi as a model, we can now interpret some of the other possessive constructions of the language:
| (2) | Donsu mi lotu bukcu | Give me your books (all of them). |
| (3) | Da pa donsu de leda mroza | X gave Y his hammer (X gave Y the-X hammer). |
| (4) | Le la Djan, horma ga kukra lemu horma | John's horse is faster than our horse. (The-John horse is faster than the-we horse.) |
| (5) | Lemi da gudbi letu de | Mine (the-me X) is better than yours (the-you Y). |
In sentence (5) a curious thing happens. A possessive description has been formed, not with a predicate, but with a variable in the usual place of the predicate (da in lemi da). What this means is that the explicit portion of the possessive description has been omitted, and we are left with its implicit portion only: namely that I am referring to some X that is related in some way to me. This is, of course, exactly what we mean by 'mine'.
Now you have probably sensed that the utility of the possessive form lies not only in its economy but in its vagueness. For it is not only simpler to say 'my hat' than 'the hat which I regularly use' in both English and Loglan (lemi kapma as opposed to le kapma ce nu plizo je mi = 'the thing which is a hat and used by me'), but just as in English, the very vagueness of the unspecified relation is sometimes useful. Suppose I don't know how Johnny is related to the car I see him driving (it is probably owned by his father). When I call it le la Djanis, tcaro ('the-Johnny car') I avoid committing myself on this delicate matter. But suppose there is no doubt about the relationship which I want to impute. Suppose I am talking about his mother. Do I say le la Djanis, matma in Loglan?
I may do so if I wish; but it is an unnecessary circumlocution for what can easily be said directly, in Loglan. For le matma je la Djanis ('the mother of Johnny') provides what will almost always be a better designation in Loglan of Johnny's mother, that is, a more useful one, than le la Djanis, matma is. For le matma je la Djanis is a specified description which relates Johnny as an offspring to his mother: a much more exact relation than "possession". Similarly, the predicates for body-parts are all two-place predicates in Loglan. It is therefore unnecessarily vague to say lemi barma ('the-me arm') when you can say le barma je mi much more explicitly. One is not related to one's arm vaguely, at least not in Loglan.
Mass descriptions may also be possessive in Loglan. Thus lo resfu means 'clothing in general' (resfu = 'is a garment, an article of clothing'), whereas lomi resfu means 'my clothing'. This is another momentary specialization of a mass term--or partial massification of a general term, as we might now prefer to say--which is similar in mood and structure to the located mass term lovi cutri. Thus semantic parallels often exist between one grammatical construction and another in Loglan, and these are usually reflected in their having similar structures in a Loglan-viewed reality.
The possessive form le la Kristobal Kolo'n, botsu ('Christopher Columbus's boat') is as clumsy an expression in Loglan as it is in English. A simple operation exists to reverse these terms...in both languages:
| (1) | Le botsu pe la Kristobal Kolo'n | The boat of Christopher Columbus. |
Notice the structural parallel between this designation and the following one:
| (2) | Le matma je la Kristobal Kolo'n | The mother of Christopher Columbus. |
Now je warns us that Christopher is related in a very definite way to his mother; that is, she bore him. But pe [peh] is a kind of vague, all-purpose linking marker saying only that he's related in some way to his boat: that he owns it, sails around on it, goes to sea in it, is its captain or its cabin-boy.
But now suppose that we wish to talk of that man's boat. 'That man' is easy enough; it is leva mrenu. But if we put leva mrenu in the position of la Djan in le la Djan botsu, we encounter a difficulty. For *le leva mrenu botsu seems to say 'the that man type of boat', which says nothing at all in Loglan. Obviously we need to terminate the internal description leva mrenu with some kind of marker. We may do so with the comma-word gu [goo], and gu may or may not be accompanied by a pause.
| (3) | Le leva mrenu gu, botsu | That man's boat (the that-man boat). |
But we may feel that this, too, is clumsy, especially if we want to say more about the man. So we might prefer the inverse possessive forms with pe:
| (4) | Le botsu pe leva mrenu | The boat of that man. |
| (5) | Le botsu, pe le bilti ce cmalo ge nirli ckela | The boat of the pretty little girls' school. |
Thus pe is used most effectively when the speaker wishes to designate the "possessor" with a longer and more elaborate construction than da plans for the "possessed."
A maneuver that looks like description but is not is to use the name operator la to turn a predicate or predicate expression into a name. The predicates used for this purpose are always predicates that may be used as calls, that is, to call the attention of someone, just as we may use the predicate 'father' to call 'Father!' in English. We will learn how to make attention-calling expressions of this kind (vocatives) in the next chapter. But in this one we are concerned with how predicate names may be used to talk about the people whose attention may be called with them.
In English we express our intention to make a name out of a predicate by dropping the article and capitalizing its initial letter when we use it in writing. 'Father', we say or write, 'got back last night.' In Loglan we accomplish this same purpose by using the name operator la in both speech and text and capitalizing the predicate word or words in text:
| (1) | La Farfu, pa favgoi [FAHV-goy] na lepazi natli | Father returned (reverse-went) last night. |
(Pazi means 'just preceding', so lepazi natli means 'the-just-past night'. There will be more on this kind of maneuver in Chapter 5.) How different this is from the same sentence with the ordinary descriptor le:
| (2) | Le farfu pa favgoi na lepazi natli | The father returned last night. |
Sentence (1) suggests that the speaker is one of the father's offspring, or at least a member of his household...one of the few people, at any rate, who are entitled to call him by that name. Sentence (2), in contrast, suggests that the speaker is a detached observer, perhaps a detective staked-out in front of the Jones house, say, who is reporting that the father of the family has returned.
In general, to use a predicate as a name rather than as a description connotes familiarity, even intimacy: the intimacy reserved for those who have the right to use such words as names. 'Father', 'Mother', 'Man', 'Woman', 'Husband', 'Darling', 'Sister', 'Brother', 'Son', 'Fatty', 'Boy', 'Big Guy', and so on, are among the numerous English predicates that turn up as names in that language.
The intimacy effect of using predicate names is often exploited by tellers of children's stories.
(3) Rat told Dog he was going fishing with Cat.
'(To) tell' is to '(to) knowledge-give' in Loglan; so this word is djadou [jah-DOH-oo] from djano donsu. '(To) go fishing with' is '(to) fish-hunt-accompany'; so this one is ficyjankii [feesh-uh-zhan-KEE-ee] from ficli janto kinci. The predicates for 'rat', 'dog' and 'cat' are ratcu, kangu and katma, respectively. So this line could go into a Loglan children's story as:
(3') La Ratcu, pa djadou la Kangu lepo de fa ficyjankii la Katma
With these examples I have let us get slightly ahead of our grammar. We do not really know how to make three-term complexes like ficyjankii ('fish-hunt-with') or modifying phrases like na lepazi natli ('in the-just-past night'), or how and when to use them. These topics will be treated in the next chapter, which is on the structure of utterances. But in the next section we will consider how we can make shorter names for use in such stories once we do know how to write them.
We are still concerned, in short, with the ingredients of utterances rather than their structure.
A name in Loglan is any consonant-final word. Therefore a very natural way of making names is to drop the final vowel or vowels from a predicate word, getting Mren from mrenu, for example, or to add a final consonant to a little word, getting Tun from tu. We may call the names made in these ways internal names because they come from inside the language. Most Loglan names, of course, are borrowed.
For example, The Institute has a dog named Cimr [SHEE-mrr] and it once had a cat named Gro'katm [GROH-kah-tmm]. The name Cimr was made from the predicate cimra [SHEEM-rah], which means 'summer' and fits the sunny temperament of its referent. The predicate grokatma [groh-KAHT-mah], which means 'big-cat', was the source of Gro'katm...with its abnormal and therefore marked stress, notice. Grokatma, from groda katma, was a complex derived on the spot for that monstrous cat.
Tun itself is an excellent example of an internal name made from a little word. It is the name of You, or of whatever person the speaker can get the attention of by shouting it. Spoken like 'You, there!' into a crowd of inert bystanders, Tun is the temporary name of whoever will respond. We'll see in Section 4.27 how numerical names, like Ten and Fon ('Three' and 'Four') may also be made by the consonant-adding route. Conventionally, the consonant that is always added to make little word names is n.
All the predicate names in the last section could have been made as calls first by the vowel-dropping route. Thus, la Farfu could have been la Farf or la Far, 'Mom' could be Mat or Matm ([MAH-tmm] to rhyme with Gro'katm), and the name of the personage called Rat in the children's story could have been rendered with either Loglan Rat [raht] or Ratc [rahtch] as the writer preferred. Similarly, the character of Dog could have been Loglan Kan or Kang [kahngg], with the hard [g] after [ng] definitely pronounced, and Cat could have been Loglan Kat [kaht] or Katm, again as the writer preferred.
Indeed, using a predicate as a name is a rather formal thing to do, just as 'Father' is formal in English. But dropping a vowel, or a vowel and a consonant, from the same predicates is an informal, even familiar move. It yields Mat and Far, which, like 'Mom' and 'Dad', amount to nicknames. So with Loglan words like Rat, Kan, Kat, Fum, Mat and Far we enter the affectionate world of nicknames.There are three other little words that have grammatical distributions which are identical to that of le and lo, and these are the set descriptors loe leu lea [loh-eh, leigh-oo, leigh-ah]. Each has a special variety of 'the' to convey that lends precision to description in Loglan. Each involves sets in some way. In the following discussion we will use the Loglan word preda to stand for any Loglan predicate expression and the English nonce word 'preda' for its translation into English as a common noun.
Loe preda designates the characteristic or typical individual preda which best exemplifies the set of predas in the given context. At bottom this is a statistical construct. For instance,
| (1) | Loe femdi cimpanizi [sheem-pah-NEE-zee] ga forli loe mendi ce humni atlete | The (typical) female chimpanzee is stronger than the typical) male human athlete. |
would require the mounting of a fairly extensive experimental enterprise in order to confirm or refute it. Indeed, (1) might be the conclusion of such an investigation, or a result remembered from reading about one.
In English we would usually say 'The chimpanzee female is stronger than the human male athlete' and leave the listener to figure out what sensible thing we might have meant. In Loglan we must do better than that. We make such statements more precise by using loe, a special kind of 'the' in which the notion of typicality is built in.
Leu preda designates the set of predas--not the individual predas, note, but the particular set--which the speaker has in mind. It means 'the set of some (predas)'.
| (2) | Leu monca gorla ga cmalo [SHMAH-loh] | The (set of) mountain gorillas (I have in mind) are few (literally, is small). |
Like le-designations, leu-designations are intentional. That is, they designate whatever set the speaker intends to designate with da's description. But unlike le-designata--the things that le-phrases designate--leu-designata are sets, not individuals. Thus, we may compare their properties with those of other sets, for example, in size, diversity, longevity, and so on. Certainly the speaker of (2) does not mean that any particular mountain gorilla is small, much less that all of them are, as Ra monca gorla ga cmalo ('All mountain gorillas are small') would claim. The universal quantifier ra will be taken up in Sections 4.23 and 4.24.
Lea preda designates, for any preda, the non-empty set of all the predas. It is universal, not intentional. Like leu, its designatum is always a set, not the members of some set. Unlike leu, it means 'the set of all (predas)'.
| (3) | Lea ficli ga laldo lea mamla | Fishes are older than mammals. |
Certainly we would not mean to claim by this English sentence that every fish is older than every mammal, or even that any individual fish is. We could only sensibly mean that the non-empty set of fishes has endured longer, i.e., has had members in it longer (on this planet, anyway), than the non-empty set of mammals.
In Loglan we wish to make these ideas clear.25
One of the cleverer things we do with language is to apply numbers to arguments. Thus when I say in English 'Those ten men are teachers' I have said something that is strictly equivalent to looking at each of them in turn and saying 'That man is a teacher' ten times. But this is not the only way in which numbers may be used. Numerical concepts may also occur as predicates (for example 'We are three', 'It was a football eleven', 'He was first in line'), as proper nouns ('The number three', 'The year 1937'), and also as indefinite descriptors ('I saw three men', 'One of the teachers smoked'). We will provide for all these uses in due course. But we must first supply the basic number words themselves. Here are the digits from zero to nine:
|
|
There are some obvious regularities. First, note that the digits are divided into five pairs and that each pair has a characteristic consonant: n t f s v. Second, note that the odd-numbered member of each pair (ne, te, fe, se and ve) ends with e. Third, note that all the even-numbered digits except ni, that is, to, fo, so and vo, end with o. The word ni (zero) is evidently the one irregular word in the system. But this makes sense. Zero is the sign of the re-cycling of the system with every tenth member and so ought to be different. Thus 'ten' is neni (10), 'twenty' is toni (20), 'thirty' is teni (30) and so on; but 'twelve' is simply neto (12) and 'one-hundred-and-twenty-three' is simply netote (123).26
For larger numbers there are two extra "zeros", as we might call them: ma (
) which represents multiplication by a hundred, or the double zero ('00') in English; and mo (
) which represents multiplication by a thousand, or the English triple zero ('000'). Thus 'one-hundred' is nema (1) in Loglan, 'a thousand' is nemo (1), 'two-thousand' is tomo (2), 'twenty-thousand' is tonimo (20), 'two-hundred-thousand' is tomamo (2), 'two million' is tomomo (2), and so on. Normally, compound number words, like compound little words generally, receive level stress. Thus [toh-mah-mah-HOOM-nee] and [veh-moh-moh-HOOM-nee] are the usual pronunciations of the Loglan phrases corresponding to 'two-hundred-thousand humans' (tomama humni) and 'nine-million humans' (vemomo humni), respectively, in which there are no pauses and in which only the penultimate syllable of the predicate word is stressed. On the other hand, any syllable in a number word may be emphasized to mark contrast: [TEH-veh-moh-moh-KAHT-mah] 'thirty-nine-million cats'. Such emphasis is often shown by underlining the emphasized syllable in text: tevemomo katma.
To round out the number system, the little word pi represents the decimal point, so that 'point-five' is pife (.5) and 'twelve and thirty-four hundredths' is simply the compound word netopitefo [neh-toh-pee-teh-foh] (12.34). Similarly, there is a set of arithmetic operators of which kua [kwah] ('divided by'), tia [tyah] ('multiplied by'), piu [pyoo] ('plus'), niu [nyoo] ('less'), pea [peigh-ah] ('positive') and nea [neigh-ah] ('negative') are the most useful. (The complete set of mathematical operators will be found in Loglan 6.) So nekuato [neh-kwah- toh] (1/2) is 'one-half'. What could be simpler? Let us now consider the uses of these number-words as argument quantifiers.
Quantification is the art of applying numbers to arguments. Sentences with quantified arguments, or, as we shall sometimes call them, plural sentences, are equivalent in meaning to those same sentences without quantified arguments (singular sentences) repeated n times; and the number of repetitions n is always equal to the product of the numbers used as quantifiers in the original sentence. Thus if I say:
| (1) | Levi to fumna ga corta leva ne mrenu | These two women are both shorter than that one man. |
what I have said is equivalent in meaning to the singular sentence,
| (2) | Levi fumna ga corta leva mrenu | This woman is shorter than that man. |
spoken twice. But if I say
| (3) | Levi to fumna ga corta leva te mrenu | These two women are (all) shorter than (each of) these three men. |
then what I have said is equivalent to speaking sentence (2) six times.
There are several things to notice about this. First, there is evidently no plural form of the Loglan descriptors levi and leva, and no plural inflection of the Loglan predicate. For with levi to fumna we are evidently not literally saying 'these two women', but 'this two woman'. Again, Loglan sounds like pidgin. There is a logical advantage as well as an obvious simplicity in this grammatical plan. For it reveals more clearly than English does what the claim of such plural sentences is about. For note that the equivalently repeated sentence--sentence (2) above--is identical to both (1) and (3) except for the presence in the latter two of the number words. Second, the meaning of the Loglan quantifier evidently includes the meaning of such occasional clarifying phrases in English as 'each of', 'all', 'both', and so on. We will see why this is so in a moment. Finally, note that the two things designated by the quantifying phrase levi to in (1) and (3) are definitely designated. For suppose I had said:
| (4) | To levi fumna ga corta ne leva mrenu | Two of these women are shorter than one of those men. |
| (5) | To levi fumna ga corta te leva mrenu | Two of these women are shorter than (some) three of those men. |
Notice that if any two of the women designated in (4) are each shorter than some one of those men, then (4) is true. And if there exists a pair of women and a trio of men belonging to the two sets designated in (5), such that each woman of the pair is shorter than each man of the trio, then that sentence is true. We will have a look at the mechanism of indefinite quantification more closely in Section 4.24 on indefinite description.
Just as in English, the indefinite quantification of an argument may be freely alternated with its definite quantification. Thus, the following forms are all possible.
| (6) | Le te fumna | (Each of) The (set of) three women (I have in mind). |
| (7) | Te le fumna | (Some) Three of the (set of) women (I have in mind). |
| (8) | To le te fumna | (Some) Two of the (set of) three women. |
| (9) | Le to le fumna | (Each of) The (subset of) two of the (set of) women. |
| (10) | Le to le te fumna | (Each of) The (subset of) two of the (set of) three women. |
And so on. Note that in these sentences le has the sense of the English phrase 'the set of', whether we are then told how many members the set has (as in Le te fumna), or not (as in To le fumna). Thus when we say To le fumna it is assumed that there are enough women in the set to yield at least two. Again we need no plural inflection of the predicate word to make this idea clear.
So far we have been concerned with quantifications of descriptions made with the particular descriptive operators le, levi and leva. But now let us consider the effects of quantifying descriptions made with the mass operator lo. As usual, we will approach our problem obliquely by first considering an English ambiguity. Suppose I tell you:
(11) The two men carried that log.
The question immediately arises: Together? Or separately? It makes a difference. For if I mean that a team of two men has carried that log, I have asserted only one thing, namely that a single individual thing--albeit two-headed--carried that log. But if there had been a log-carrying contest, say, and each of two men succeeded in carrying that particular log, then I am, in effect, asserting two things when I say "they" carried it. Namely, that one of them did, and that the other of them did, too, presumably on different occasions.
Now the second of these interpretations is, as we have seen, exactly the meaning of the Loglan quantification with le. Thus,
| (12) | Le to mrenu pa berti da | Each of the two men carried it. |
expresses the notion of two successful occasions exactly. For this is indeed the sentence form that is equivalent to itself without to spoken two times. And now, just as you might expect, the sense of the two-headed individual having carried the log is neatly accomplished with lo:
| (13) | Lo to mrenu pa berti da | The mass individual composed of two men carried it. |
This parallel use of le and lo with quantifiers completely avoids the major source of ambiguity in the use of numbers in English. Suppose we say 'The two men went to London.' Did they go as a group, or separately? The English sentence doesn't say. 'The four women played bridge.' Are you saying four things? Or only one? The English sentence doesn't say, though in this case, we would usually guess from context that the best Loglan translation was to be made with lo.
Thus whenever a number of individuals are involved in such a way that they function together as a group, then the Loglan translation will usually be made with lo. But wherever sets of individuals are involved in such a way that we have something to say about each individual member of the set, then the Loglan designation will usually be made with le. The ambiguity of the English quantified form 'The two men carried it' can of course be resolved in English by the use of such qualifying phrases as 'each of', 'separately', 'together', 'as a group', and so on. But such maneuvers are not necessary in order to speak clearly in Loglan. Thus le to mrenu means 'each of the two men' without further qualification, and lo to mrenu means 'the two-man group' and not really 'the two men' at all. Again we find that Loglan makes a logical distinction clearly and explicitly that is implicit in English, but obscurely and irregularly handled in that language.
The Loglan words meaning 'all', 'some', 'many', and the like are used grammatically in exactly the same ways that the Loglan numerical quantifiers are used. Eight of these non-numerical quantifiers are presently defined:
| ra | all, every, each of |
| ro | much, many of |
| re | most, more than half of |
| ri | little, several, a few of |
| ru | enough, a sufficient number of |
| sa | about, around, almost all of |
| su | some, at least, at least one of |
| si | at most, up to, at most one of |
The five r-words may be used in place of numbers, but they may not be used next to a number word. Thus one does not say 'All three of the men' in Loglan (*Ra te le mrenu), simply because Te le mrenu already means all of some three of the men. Similarly Ra le te mrenu ('All of the three men') is acceptable but redundant because Le te mrenu already means 'Each of the three men'. So the quantifier ra does not often accompany Loglan descriptions, being implicitly present in nearly all of them. But Ri le se mrenu ('Several of the seven men'), Lo ro mrenu ('The mass individual composed of many men'), and Re le ro mrenu ('Most of the many men'), are all useful forms. On the other hand, each of the three s-words sa, su and si may be usefully prefixed to numbers. When they are, they become part of a compound number word, as in the following sentences:
| (1) |