X-Digest-Num: 296
Message-ID: <44114.296.1611.959273825@eGroups.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 05:02:46 EST
From: Pycyn@aol.com
Subject: Re: "What I have for dinner depends on what there is in the fridge"
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<< 
 >   What I have for dinner depends on what there is in the fridge.
 
 I think that 2nd-order logic does the trick:
 
    Ef: Ex: Ey: fxy & I have x for dinner & y is in the fridge
 
 Or in words:
 
    There is a relation between something and something else, such
    that the former is what I have for dinner and the latter is
    what is in the fridge.
 
 
 -- 
 John Cowan    >>

This gets "is somehow related to" but hardly "depends on;" I suspect that {se 
jitro}
is about as close as we can come in gismu and leave appropriate tanru to 
others.  I doubt thatthe relation is between some one thing in the meal and 
one thing in the refrigerator -- or between and clusters as individuals.  
Rather the dependency is on the whole set (or maybe mass) of things in the 
refrigerator (if there were only ham and chicken, I'd take chicken, but since 
there is roast beef too, I'll take that, even though I'd probably take the 
ham over the roast beef if those were all the available). Further, one 
possibility (missing above) is surely that I have nothing to eat, because my 
fridge is as empty as my wallet.   I suspect that the complexities could be 
multiplied here beyond the simple version of even this line.  Presumably, 
part of what is intended is that what I have for dinner will be mainly some 
subset of what is in  my fridge with the elses picked appropriately from the 
staples.  But that is only usual even for a carefully preplanned meal; here 
the point is that the 'plan' for the meal will consist in selecting from the 
content rather than seeing to it that the intended foods are aboard. Even all 
this does not quite get to this sentence and the difference may just be 
irrevocably {kau}, but I hope not. (something in {lae} maybe?
pc