Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Wed, 18 Mar 92 11:42 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA09066; Wed, 18 Mar 92 11:11:34 EST Received: from pucc.Princeton.EDU by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA05843; Wed, 18 Mar 92 10:54:45 -0500 Message-Id: <9203181554.AA05843@relay1.UU.NET> Received: from PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU by pucc.Princeton.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4001; Wed, 18 Mar 92 10:40:38 EST Received: by PUCC (Mailer R2.08 ptf012) id 4575; Wed, 18 Mar 92 10:40:19 EST Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1992 09:42:29 EST Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Subject: Re: A pair of how-do-i-say-it's X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: <9203172207.AA00260@relay1.UU.NET>; from "Mark E. Shoulson" at Mar 17, 92 4:45 pm Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Wed Mar 18 11:42:51 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN la mark. clsn. cusku di'e > Say what? That doesn't seem to make sense to me. I can agree that {ni'o} > should cancel assignments, but {.i}? Grammatically, there's no stronger > tie between {.i}-joined sentences and {.ije}-joined sentences. Maybe I'll > go easy on you if you say I have to use {.ibo} or {.ijebo}; at least that's > technically a bit closer. I made an attempt at one point to separate simple ".i" from ijeks, but I couldn't get the details to come out right, so we are stuck with an infelicity in the grammar. Actually, the shoe is on the other foot: any use of a bound variable implies the existence of a prenex in which it is bound, and the grammar says the scope of a prenex is a single sentence. The extension to allow a prenex to cover multiple sentences connected with ijeks is pragmatic. > Hmmm. I can see it, but it looks klugdy. Actually, it may not be so hot. > Look: the way I see it, this sentence is: "For all > things-that-are-something1: [if] Anyi desires the-event: (something) > is-something1, then (something) is-something1", using "is-something" for > selbriness. Leaving aside the fact that I agree with Nick that causality > is not something you should have to do truth-tables for, the prenex isn't > quantifying over all predicates, it's quantifying over all *things* that > satisfy this unspecified predicate, just as {ro prenu} is all things which > fulfil "prenu"itude, i.e. "all people". (ro broda ~= ro lo ro broda). Does > this make sense to anyone else, or am I missing something? I suppose I can > see how it can wind up meaning what you want, but not well. Oh, how about > {ro nu bu'a zo'u}? Hmmm. doesn't look much better, same problem. I can't > think of any way, grammatical or not, within Lojban's (or my own) framework > to get what I'm looking for; how do you quantify over relationships? It's simply a convention of the language that " bu'a" within a prenex quantifies over the relationship; it's not semantically parallel to "ro prenu". To make it otherwise would require magic behavior where "bu'a" worked like a sumti within the prenex and like a selbri elsewhere, and the grammar simply isn't up to such tricks. You should think of "ro bu'a" as parallel to "ro da". > I was kind of looking for a > way to parenthesize sumti, to make them one sumti of a lower level, just as > ke/ke'e braces parenthesize selbri to low-level selbri so the precedence > changes.... Lojbab says that LUhI is indeed the right way to parenthesize sumti, even though LUhI also carries the semantic burden of doing conversions between sumti types. -- cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban