From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sat Apr 18 14:55:29 2009 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:55:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1LvIVV-0003C7-KI for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:55:29 -0700 Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1LvIVV-0003By-GW for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:55:29 -0700 Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:55:29 -0700 From: Robin Lee Powell To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: order of sumti effects their meaning? Message-ID: <20090418215529.GE17828@digitalkingdom.org> References: <5715b9300904181435r70e35abdx57bd1d39e4a4174d@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <5715b9300904181435r70e35abdx57bd1d39e4a4174d@mail.gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) X-archive-position: 1557 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 05:35:23PM -0400, Luke Bergen wrote: > so I just read through section 5 of chapter16 of the refgram and > am confused by this line: "since it is the order in which the > variables appear that matters we can say ...". > > basically in "de poi gerku cu batci ro da poi prenu" "de poi > gerku" is translated as "there-is-a-Y which is a dog" but in "ro > da poi prenu cu se batci de poi gerku" the same string is > translated as "_some_ Y which is a dog". Those mean exactly the some thing, AFAICT. What makes you think they are different? The order matters because we stole this construct from predicate logic; understanding that is really required to understand these sentences. The issue is binding of numbers on the variables. In the first sentence, there is 1 de, some dog. It bites every human; many da. That is, the single de scopes over the many da. "There is a (single) dog which bit every human". In the second sentence, there are many da, but they scope over the single de, which means that there is a single de *for each of the many humans*. "Every human is bitten by a dog (but they need not all be the same dog)". *Technically*, da/de with no number is "su'o da", so the hyper-explicit versions are: "There exists at least one particular dog(s) which, by themself/ves, bit every human." "For every human, there exists at least one particular dog(s) which bit him/her." The issue is order of quantification, not order of variables as such. You can make the first sentence into the second by doing: ro da de zo'u de poi gerku cu batci ro da poi prenu This puts the specification of quantifier scoping out front, to make it more explicit that we've got predicate logic scoping and weird shit may occur. -Robin -- They say: "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons." And I'm thinking: "Does it even occur to you to try for something other than the default outcome?" -- http://shorl.com/tydruhedufogre http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/