Subject: aymara once mora

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 15:52:21 EDT

Some odds and ends about Aymara and trivalent logic.

Dr. Guzman and his thesis that Aymara has a trivalent logic
has not been warmly received by the linguistic community
and he has been accused of paternalism toward his
informants. His story now is that he was led to his thesis by
his problems in teaching his Aymara students mathematics
and that he solved this problem when he discovered they
had a different logic. He also claims to have found within
Aymara a perfect intermediary language for machine
translation and, based on the new logic, a program for
employing it. So far as I can find, not samples have come
forth and the linguists tend to pooh-pooh the notion. 
Umberto Eco mentions some of this in his _Dream_of_a_
Perfect_Language_ and claims there that, while it is easy to
translate almost anything into Aymara, it is almost
impossible to translate out, "Aymara is a Black Hole."
Grondin (no citation available) divides Guzman's logical
operators across several classes (tense, mood,, mode,
aspect, evidentials, confidentials, etc.) each of which also
contains elements that are not in Guzman's list (but Aymara
is apparently a freely agglutinating language, so attempts to
give it fixed paradigms are suspect).

There are two or three websites in Aymara -- maybe more.

The Guzman explanation of the binary connectives works,
giving exactly one ninth of the possible trivalent
connectives, each one describable nine different ways. The
forms produced include all of the Lukasiewicz
{uukaceivitc} forms, though only scattered Bochvar forms. 
But, in any case, all the forms needed to generate the
complete set using repeated sentences: min, max, three
kinds of negations, a couple of other conjunctions and
disjunctions, the conditionals and equivalences that go with
those as well as a few extra ones (the Bochvars, for
example), Sheffer and Peirce functions, fixed value
functions, "not true", "false" and so on. So, even if it did
not have functional completeness, it is well set up to do
normal linguistic business.

The tails (+/- 4SD) tell us that Aymara is the oldest language in the world 
(usual mumble here) and that it is the designed creation of the god (= alien) 
Vairocana and thus is the language for the most accurate description of the 
world as it really is and for perfect social intercourse. The professional 
linguists assure us that it is as closely related to Quechua ("Incan") as 
Basque is to Spanish.