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In a message dated 11/6/2002 9:27:59 PM Central Standard Time, jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: << that if we want {naku ro broda cu brode} to be >> But why would we want that equivalence. It is a product of the same mistake that makes "Every S is P" into the universally quantified conditional. We have two ways to treat a universal in Logic. Lojban offers both and in the same format as they are offered in Logic. Further the two ways in Lojban are related exactly as they are in Logic. This seems to be the kind of result we would want. If you really want a short way to say non-importing {ro}, then use the device you devised (? {ni'u ro}?) and all will come out as you want. << [&] . It may be irrelevant to 99.9% of usage as a >whole, but is it irrelevant to 99.9% of usage of ro? I >don't think so -- necessarily-nonimporting "every" is very >common in English (at least in the varieties I'm exposed to >in quotidian and professional life); pc's experience differs). You may be right. It would be interesting to see the results if someone actually took the trouble of going through some corpus to measure the relative frequencies. >> I'm not sure just how this survey would work. Surely most cases are ones in which the subject term is non-null, so you cannot tell which kind of quantifier is used. I suspect that the number cases of using a null-subject universal when you know the subject is null is vanishing small outside of indirect proofs in mathematics and logic. Using a universal with a subject which turns out to be null is not uncommon, but claiming that you meant a non-importing quantifier seems just a way of avoiding being convicted of saying something false. I think there is a footnote in Vendler about some actual corpus checks, with essentially this outcome. To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. |