Message-ID: <34906560.4118@locke.ccil.org> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 17:12:48 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: GLI Re: Indirect questions References: <199712112002.PAA29736@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2061 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Dec 11 17:12:48 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - la .and. cusku di'e > OK. But I think your position entails that la`e should include > all entailments, given that it is established which world the > utterance is talking about. So I think you are in effect > arguing that {la`e lu she painted the house his favourite > colour} can be the proposition "She painted the house blue". > I'm unhappy with that. Remember that "la'e" is rather broad: it maps a reference to its referent. It is already established that la'e zoi .gy. The Red Pony .gy. cu cukta, for example. Here the referent of the words is a certain book, not simply the meaning of those words. > There are certain contexts where Q-kau just doesn't make any sense > (e.g. if it occured within a sumti of the majority of gismu). Indeed, "kau" makes no sense except within a NU-bridi, and only for certain members of NU at that, of which "du'u" is the most prominent. There may, I say may, be others, notably "ka", since "du'u" is closely related to "ka". In any event, sumti based on NU-bridi make little sense for many selbri (or, more simply and Quinishly, lead to false bridi: le nu mi nanmu cu gerku is simply false, not meaningless, not a category mistake). > However, I think I now find myself able to rationalize such a > convention. {cusku le se du`u xu kau Y} would mean "utter a > piece of text that says whether Y is true". Logically, that would > be: Doubtless then "la djan. cusku le se du'u ma kau klama le zarci" means that John said who went to the store, which seems good to me. > whereas {cusku le se du`u Y} would be > > utter a piece of text, t, such that t expresses (a > truth-conditional equivalent of) Y. That is too weak, or "John said that 2+2=4" would be a fair report of John saying that 4+4=8, since "2+2=4" and "4+4=8" are truth-conditionally equivalent. Or do you mean something different by "a truth-conditional equivalent"? > (I hope > that a discovery of the regularity is waiting over the horizon.) Amen. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban