I don't know, I somehow see {mi djuno lo jei lo broda cu brode}* as
considerably easier to understand than {mi djuno lo du'u xukau lo broda cu
brode}. You're right that length alone isn't that big of a deal. We were
talking about this in IRC recently actually, and someone was thinking that
{go'i} was longer than it needed to be when there are so many little-used
monosyllabic cmavo. By the end the general conclusion was that a difference
of a single syllable here and there wasn't that big of a deal.
But to me {jei} actually does make more sense than {du'u xukau}. Indirect
questions in general are confusing to me, and I never quite got a grasp of
them in Latin, where I had a pretty good grasp of most other things
grammatically. They flow naturally in English because it's my native
language, but when stripped of the thought flow that English grants, I get
perplexed by them in general. By contrast, truth values make perfect sense
to me; if it didn't sound bizarre to talk about them in English I would
probably talk in those terms.
*I think I can say this in this way, though I might be wrong, since
{djuno}'s x2 is labeled as a du'u in my dictionary...
mu'omi'e .latros.
2010/3/15 Jorge Llambías <[email protected]>
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Ian Johnson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > Incidentally, I don't quite understand why "truth value" shouldn't come
> up
> > in conversation once you're using a short term like {jei}, which is
> > considerably less cumbersome and IMO more straightforward than the
> > alternative, especially in a language which has part of its basis in
> > classical logic.
>
> I doubt that the length of a word will have much of an effect on how
> often people will talk about what the word denotes. If something is
> spoken about a lot, it may happen that it will acquire a short and
> convenient word to refer to it, but it seems to me that providing a
> short word for something will not really make people want to talk
> about it.
>
> As for truth values, they may come up when talking _about_ logic, but
> not necessarily when using logic or when talking logically. Also, when
> talking about logic you are more likely to talk about truth values in
> general, rather than the truth value of a particular proposition, and
> "jei" is not very useful for that. Not that I see people talking about
> "lo se jetlai" much either. It seems that Lojbanists don't spend much
> time talking about logic in Lojban.
>
> mu'o mi'e xorxes
>
>
>
>
