Re: [lojban-beginners] ganai-gi and if-then

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

You're not alone if you feel confused by logical conjunctions. If by any chance there's some sort of Sapir-Whorfian benefit to learning the logic logical parts of Lojban, then that strange disorienting presently unpleasant feeling is actually the feeling of you being Sapir-Whorfed by grokking deeply how to logically conjunct things. I don't know either if that's true but it's reassuring to think anyway while you're being overwhelmed by it.

The "A" and/or conjunction affirms three cases and denies only one. So I find it's marginally less confusing to consider it in terms of the single case that it denies, just because then we're thinking about one thing instead of three. So with {ga B gi C} there's three affirmed cases, that it's just B, just C, or both B and C. Which is simple enough if nothing's negated. ;) But let's just think about the remaining case, the one case denied: It is NOT the case that neither B nor C. The only case that doesn't happen is that neither side is true.

OK so keep thinking about just that one negative case, and look at {ganai B gi C}-- the only case that doesn't happen is when neither side is true, that is, when NOT not B (that is, B) and also not C. Confusing as mabla, but at least it's one thing to think about instead of three. One case is denied: That B happens, but C doesn't. It doesn't happen that B happens but C doesn't happen. In every case where B happens, C happens. It's not being asserted the other way around, we're not saying C implies B-- that's one of the three affirmed cases, is when C, but not B. The only case denied is the case where B happens but C does not.

Mostly you don't need to say that. Mostly you're not trying to logically associate events in the world. You're just trying to talk about hypothetical causation. {lo nu broda cu jalge da'i lo nu brode} Theoretically, an event of broda would result from an event of brode. You can say that with only slightly more vagueness and fairly concisely as {brode ja'e da'i lo nu broda} which is the sort of construction I usually speak in myself. If you're just interested in expressing the relationships between hypothetical events, and you don't care at the moment about expressing a particular logical relationship, that's the set of tools you want. It's slightly confusing because it's in two parts: One part shows the relationship between the events (the causal brivla and their abbreviations) and the other part, {da'i}, just throws it into the hypothetical. But I'm sure you'll agree it's still less alien than logically connecting things. ;)

As far as understanding {ganai .. gi ..} in the wild, frankly you'll get farthest just reading it as "if .. then .." because people (mis)learned to (mis)use it that way. Do your best to get it right yourself, but just read it that way unless someone asks you to correct their Lojban. :D

mu'omi'e la stela selckiku

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