Message-Id: <199602232253.RAA06515@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Thu, 22 Feb 1996 06:22:49 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: re "except" etc.
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Content-Length: 1752

>This is a bit unfair. First, Jorge asked how to do "only" et al.
>preserving syntactic sumti-selbri structure (e.g. making "only birds fly"
>like "birds fly" rather than "all fliers are birds" or whatever).
>Second, Lojban already has a word glossed as "only", which - of all
>things - is in among the discursives. Turn your fire on that.


The discursives are among other things intended to be used for naturalistic
short forms for regular logical apparatus.  Thus, I think that "po'o
" should be equivalent to some fairly well-stated logical formula, which may
be dependent on the structure it is attached to.  But in the case of "only"
we assigned it to such a cmavo only after looking seriously at how many
varieties oflogical structures were needed to express a concept that is
apparently straightforward n natlangs.  There were thus a LOT of postings
with lots of logical structures in them, before we decided to make "po'o"
a word.

In any case, now that pc has added (or inflicted, as Nora is starting to
feel as she plows through it for this household) McCawley to our list
of resources, we have decidedly taken a stronger bent for at least KNOWING
how to do things the logical way before trying to find short cuts.  Too many
unending discussions of the last couple years have been that way because we
failed to nail down the porblem in commonly understood terminology before
we tried to "solve" it.  Now for example, pc has told me on the side that
one problem with the "any" discussion is that we were probably using "opaque"
to mean more than one thing - a real problem since half of us can't keep
straight what opaque meant in any context, much less dealing with an
ambiguous meaning shift between contexts and users of the term.

lojbab