Subject: Re: [lojban] interpretation of ".ijanai" & ".ana" as 'if'

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 10:52:19 EDT

In a message dated 00-09-12 08:59:49 EDT, jildicnen writes:

<< 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>>
You can look at it that way, but in fact these to conditionals "say the same 
thing, "
are logically equivalent, true or false together (and both are equivalent to 
the original disjunction). If writing them both out helps see how truth 
functional connectives work, fine, but we did not hid anything from you by 
omitting one of these forms.

<<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).>>

Well, it's a disjunction not a conjunction (connective "and", {e}) and the 
"if" form is {anai}, not {ana}, which breaks down. this is also some what 
misleading because strictly speaking, the second claim is {la bab klama la 
zarci}; the negation is strictly part of the connective between the claims. 
And as noted, the "second implication" is not omitted, since it is the same 
as the first as far as the logic goes.

<<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. >>

I hope that it helps you to see both conditional forms, even if they contain 
no new information.