On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:57 AM, tijlan
<jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11 May 2011 18:24, Michael Turniansky <
mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It does make an assertion and impart information, yes, and that
>> assertion and information are incompatible in the way you formed the
>> _expression_, "lo no gerku cu xekri". What is your assertion about? "lo
>> gerku". You want to ascribe the property "none of which are black".
>
>
> NO!!!! I do NOT want to make that assertion! Please stop putting words in
> my mouth! I was very explicit which assertion I was making. That there are
> NO dogs! PERIOD!
> I explicitly stated that it does NOT "impart any other
> information that it might on the surface appear to"
black" to the dogs:
> we know no matter how many there are, none of them are black.
And you had explicitly stated that you can "truthfully say "lo no
gerku cu xekri"":
On 9 May 2011 20:44, Michael Turniansky <
mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't believe "lo no gerku cu blabi" to be self contradictory/nonsense.
> Consider a room containing three white dogs -- lo ci gerku cu blabi
> I take one away -- lo re gerku cu blabi
> I take another away -- lo pa gerku cu blabi
> I take the last one away -- lo no gerku cu blabi
> no gerku cu xekri".
You can truthfully say "none of them are black", but probably not in this way:
I don't know how many times or differents ways I can say this. I am not trying to say that "none of them are black". If I wanted to say that I would say "no lo PA gerku cu xekri" (where PA is any number, including "no") The point is that when I start a sentence "lo no gerku cu ", I can end it with any selbri I want, and it will be true, because you can say anthing you want about the members of set that has no members in it, and that the only thing the sentence is truly asserting is that you have no members. Just like "lo pa gerku cu xekri" does not mean "one of the dogs is black", but rather "the one dog is black", "lo no gerku cu xekri" means that "the zero dogs are black".
lo no gerku ... = [ da poi gerku je nomei ] or more precisely [ da poi
gerku poi nomei ] ...
Reason 1: You aren't making reference to the white non-black dogs by
which the truth of "none of them are black" can be inferred.
That's true, because they are black, and white, and purple. They are also equally non-black, non-white and non-purple. Because they don't exist.
Reason 2: You can't sensibly mean to refer to something which is-dog
which is-none.
But why not?
But you can sensibly pick none of something which is-dog:
no lo gerku = no [ da poi gerku ]
> The only assertion I WANT to make is that there are no dogs.
Then:
no da gerku
no (lo) gerku cu zvati / zasti
...
"lo no gerku cu blabi" from your own comment not only is unnecessary
for your own aim stated above (since it imparts more information than
"there are no dogs"), but also seems unsound.
As I said, an INEFFICIENT method of asserting there are no dogs.
But it's not unsound. Will you grant me that "ro lo gerku cu blabi" makes sense for any amount of white dogs that we are discussing? Why should that be any less sensical if the amount of dogs in the room is zero? (Just like I can say to my kids "I'll give you all the dollars in my pocket" even if that number is zero?) Therefore, just like we can say "ro lo ci gerku cu blabi" we can say "ro lo no gerku cu blabi". And if we can say that, we can say "lo no gerku cu blabi"
Or do you want to assert also that "the white dogs aren't in the
room", as more proper to the actual context of your example of "a room
and three white dogs"?
I am not making any claim that there are white dogs anywhere in the universe, anymore than saying "I will give you all the fire-breathing unicorn-elves in my pocket" makes a claim about the existence of fire-breathing unicorn-elves anywhere in the universe. "lo no gerku cu blabi" makes two claims -- 1) the dogs in my universe of discussion are white, and 2) there are no dogs in my universe of discussion. (and hence, whatever claim I am making about them in 1) is pointless).
--gejyspa