Subject: Re: [lojban] de-, un- ce zo'e

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 17:33:50 -0500

On Sun, 03 Dec 2000, [email-masked] wrote:
>
>The encrypt/decrypt set is obviously only one of a large set of do/undo pairs 
>and, rather than getting too bound in the messinesses of a single case or so, 
>we might look for a general solution. None of the obvious seem quite right: 
>{tol} has been examined already, {na'e} gets the wrong results too often, 
>{fa'e} regverses orders but in fact the order of steps in the process is 
>often not reversed but the reversal comes in a different place (the steps in 
>coding and decoding are often the same, just the nature of the input differs 
>-- though, of course, there are many cases where the two processes are quite 
>different, but still not reversals), and {dut} is almost the same as {tol} at 
>least in definition. So we need to rethink what is involved here and work 
>more on it.

The confusion is at least largely from the presence in English of two prefixes
un-. One means "not" and is the cognate of German un-, Latin in-, Greek an-,
and Russian ne-; the other means "opposite" and is the cognate of German ent-,
Greek anti-, and nothing springs to mind in Russian. They can often be applied
to the same word: a string can be untied, meaning that it is not tied and may
never have been tied; or it can be untied, meaning that someone unties it.

phma