Re: [jboske] putative tense scope effects (was: RE:

[Adam Raizen <araizen@cs.huji.ac.il>]

la xod. cusku di'e

> This whole issue has seriously dampened my enthusiasm for Lojban! I am now
> forced to revise my internal understanding of the Bridi. The CLL is
> totally not clear on these issues which are actually crucial and
> fundamental to Lojban. You logickers are simply able to translate your
> knowledge over, and this all seems natural to you, but I've never learned
> formal logic. Had it been made clear that it was a prerequisite, I would
> have. 

When I started with Lojban, I also had never studied formal logic, but I 
felt that I could not understand some of the discussions well enough, as 
well as how Lojban worked in general, so I learned enough to get by.

> I thought the relevancy of variable order inside prenexes was
> restricted to sentences with prenexes and statements including da. Now,
> four years on, I learn that there are secret das inside every lo and le,
> such that sumti order totally affects the claim, and that tense sumtcita
> location matters. I could be mistaken, but I don't recall seeing any of
> this in the chapter on LE, on FA or SE, or on tense sumtcita. If it's
> there and I missed it, then it's my bad. But either way it's four years of
> intuition down the drain.

I just looked through the relavant chapter, and I can find nothing which 
explicitly says that lo = da poi, which is extremely surprising to me, 
since I am not sure how I came to be aware of the equivalence otherwise. 
(Actually, I suppose it must have been a passing comment on the list by 
John, but I still had come to know it so thoroughly that I had 
considered it indisputable.) There are several places where the book 
says something which in conjunction with something else it says might be 
taken as evidence that the two expressions are equivalent. OTOH, ch. 16 
sec. 6 says that PA broda is equivalent to PA da poi broda, but in ch. 8 
sec. 6 it says "so-called indefinite sumti like ``re karce'' [..] [mean] 
almost the same as ``re lo karce''". I suppose that "almost the same" 
means that there actually is some difference, and hence a difference 
between 'da poi karce' and 'lo karce', but I have no idea what it could 
be (outside of syntactic differences, and considering that 'da poi 
karce' is 'da poi ke'a karce').

mu'o mi'e .adam.