Subject: interpretation of ".ijanai" & ".ana" as 'if'

From: "Garrett Jones" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 12:58:34 -0000

i've been reading through the reference grammar and am currently at
chapter 14, which is about the lojban connectives. They are one of the
most confusing aspects of lojban that i've seen so far. One of the
main reasons, i suspect, is the attempt to explain a logical language
using an illogical one, which leads to confusion when trying to use
the colloquial translation to figure out a lojban sentence.

I got stuck for a while on the lojban connection ".ijanai" and it's
english interpretation as 'if'. I created my own examples, created
truth tables, turned them backwards and upside down, then i finally
figured it out.

Any form of -a- (or) actually contains two ifs inside of it. For
example, the sentence:

la djan. .a la bab. klama le zarci
"john or bob went to the store"

contains two ifs:
-if bob didn't go to the store(second claim is false), then john did
(for the whole statement to be true)
-if john didn't go to the store(first claim is false), then bob did

The reason for this is that if one claims of the conjunction is
incorrect, then the other side must be true for the whole statement to
be true(or the speaker is lying). The ".ijanai" (or .ana) connection
is the same thing, except one of the sentences is negated, with the
following two if-statement results:

la djan. .ana la bab. klama le zarci

-if bob went to the store(second claim is false), then john did [this
is the interpretation used by the reference grammar: "John went to the
store if bob did"]
-if john didn't go to the store(first claim is false), then bob didn't
go either [this implication is omitted by the reference grammar).

The english interpretation used by the reference grammar omits the
second implication and is what led to my confusion. I hope this clears
up any confusion that other people had on the same issue.

-co'o mi'e jildicnen