On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 6:40 AM, tijlan
<jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
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
> Of course, when I take the last one away, I can equally truthfully say "lo
> no gerku cu xekri".
otherwise, we can't determine whether or not "na xekri" holds at all
in the given context. You can truthfully say
a) some particular things are not xekri, or
b) nothing of some particular things are xekri.
That is, if any statement with "xekri" is to have any discernible
truth value in the particular domain of discourse of your example, it
must make reference to "lo ci gerku poi blabi" (or alternatively "lo
gerku poi blabi gi'e ci mei"); "... cu (ja'a) xekri" can be said to be
true only if the x1 refers to that particular given entity AND is
quantified with "no":
no lo gerku cu xekri
Not:
lo no gerku cu xekri
mu'o
But those are two different assertions. In the first, we don't know how many dogs are in the universe of discourse, but we know no matter how many there are, none of them are black. The second says there are in fact zero dogs (lo gerku cu nomei), and it's the second part that really doesn't add any information, since any assertion about a nomei (other than an assertion about its cardinality, I guess) is per force true, and therefore adds no further information. That's right, I am saying that "lo no gerku cu broda", for any value of broda, asserts one thing, and one thing only, that "lo gerku cu nomei". Therefore it's neither contradictory, nor meaningless, nor nonsense. It does make an assertion, it does impart information (that we have no dogs), it just imparts it in an efficient way, and does not impart any other information that it might on the surface appear to.
--gejyspa