Message-Id: <199709251759.MAA11961@locke.ccil.org>
Reply-To: And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>
Date: Thu Sep 25 12:59:56 1997
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>
Organization: University of Central Lancashire
Subject:      Re: RV: na'e entails na?
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To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
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Jorge:
> 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.

I am happy to go along with this as the final verdict on
{na`e}, but I do note that now that Don has brought "na ... po`o"
into the arena the necessity of that verdict may be
diminished.

--And