From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:53:27 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI Received: (qmail 11451 invoked from network); 25 Sep 1997 01:32:08 -0000 Received: from segate.sunet.se (192.36.125.6) by xiron.pc.helsinki.fi with SMTP; 25 Sep 1997 01:32:08 -0000 Received: from segate.sunet.se by SEGATE.SUNET.SE (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <8.0FC2A4B8@SEGATE.SUNET.SE>; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 3:32:06 +0100 Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 06:20:56 -0300 Reply-To: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Sender: Lojban list From: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Subject: Re: RV: na'e entails na? To: lojban Content-Length: 1864 Lines: 37 Message-ID: Ok, once again I have been persuaded by And to change my mind. My position now is that na'e by itself does not entail na. It only does so when the selbri in question partitions its domain into exclusive regions (I try to explain what I mean by this below). >For example, everyone is either citizen of France or citizen of >some other country. [NB INCLUSIVE OR] I want to describe >the latter group as "na`e fraso zei selgugde" [...] > but will not be >able to if everyone bar me gets their way! I now agree with your position, as long as it is clear that {na'e broda} asserts not just any relationship other than broda. It must claim that a relationship from a very reduced group holds among the arguments. For the case of fraso, the relationships that may hold can be glico, dotco, spano, brito, etc, but not for example ropno, since {ko'a ropno} does not allow us to conclude that {ko'a na'e fraso}. In the case of glico we cannot have brito as one of the possible "others", and so on. How this very restricted group of relationships is selected is the difficult part, and probably very context dependent. In many cases the domain of arguments gets partitioned into exclusive regions by the predicates, and then na'e does entail na. For example, taking {zmana'u} to mean "x1 is positive", then {ko'a na'e zmana'u}, "k is non-positive", does entail {ko'a na zmana'u}, because the only possibilities left are that k is negative or that k is zero. All other relationships that may be true of ko'a are irrelevant. With this strong restriction, I think there isn't really that much of a distance between the strong and weak forms of na'e. In many cases it makes no difference which one we choose. I prefer the weak form because, as And pointed out, the strong form can be easily obtained with an end-of-bridi naku, whereas the weak form cannot. co'o mi'e xorxes