Re: [jboske] guaspi any (was: RE: Digest Number 135

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

And Rosta scripsit:

> My first thought was "But that's obviously merely a question of the
> scope of the existential quantifier" ("Bring it about that there are
> nails that you hand me" v. "There are nails that I command you hand
> me"),

So it is, but Gua\spi doesn't have explicit machinery for quantifiers
and bound variables any more than English does: though a descendant of
Loglan, it is in a very real sense not a loglan.

> "A minute ago, I ate an apple (any apple)"
> 
> would mean. If you could find a sensible interpretation for that, then
> the guaspi gadri would be vindicated. I think the only sensical interpretation
> is to read it as Unique: if "I ate x" is true of
> any apple, and if x is an apple, then there must be exactly one
> apple.

The trouble with this and similar examples is that the unrestricted
use of "any" they show is simply alien to my English, and I have
little or no intuition about it. For me, "I am married to any woman"
is quite ungrammatical.

> I wish that Loglan had had the good sense to use jimc's ideas, instead
> of casting him out as a heretic. 

Jimc was the xorxes of his day: prolific author in a variant dialect.

> I suppose that Lojban's excuse was
> that it was constituted to just finish of JCB Loglan and no more than
> that, except in the addition of sundry sorts of cruft like attitudinals
> that Lojbab now and again crows about.

Grumpy today, aren't we.

Gua\spi, from the Lo??an perspective, discards the baby with the bathwater.

-- 
John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com
"In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."
--Brian K. Reid