| In a message dated 4/17/2001 11:58:59 PM Central Daylight Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: > {ji'a}, however, does not change truth values, so is not a case in point. Yes, the sample sentence is strange -- but it is not false (assuming that {le bolci cu go'i}is not false). {ji'a} is the wrong discursive to use at this point; {sa'e} would be better or some other "namely rider." The "in addition" is the remark, not the thing mentioned in the remark: " the ball too" is sloppy translating for "moreover the ball." Having said that, I recognize that the conventions that are built into the language are being violated all the time, that "usage is deciding" and changing the language even during the freeze, which turns out, as a consequence, to have been a someone misguided idea. Still, there is no harm -- and possibly some good -- in trying to learn and use the language asit was intended for a while before we go off and make something livable but sloppy out of it. <You can't say for example: "Only the cat likes that chair, not even the cat likes it." That's contradictory.> I say it frequently (well, things of that form, all my cats are in the sandbox in the sky) "only my wife likes olives and even she can't stand them" Even English is occasionally a logical language, and even if it weren't, Lojban is. Since Lojban has consistently refused to give existential import to universally quantified terms (and it has repeatedly over nearly 50 years), it is stuck with the situation that "only S are P" does not entail that some S are P or even that there are some Ss or some Ps. In most cases, you can get a Gricean implicature to that effect, but that is cancellable by context -- including factual additions. "Only the brave deserve the fair" = "None but the brave deserve the fair" = "No one that is not brave deserves the fair" and so on, each step making it clearer that no commitment is made to there being either a brave personor a person who deserves the fair. <><Avoiding {du} is always good Lojban practice, though.> >Why would"the logical language" want to do away with a central partof the >language of logic? Neither {mintu} nor {me} are as well defined. I don't know, it is never needed in normal usage, and almost every time when it is used, it is misused.> Here is a "normal" usage where it precisely is needed and in its most correct form. How is it misused? As another "is"? <, but "only the cat likes that chair" does imply that the cat likes that chair. It is not just a case of "only Ss are Ps".> What is it a case of, then? Surely the fact that the subject is singular does not alter the logic so completely -- especially if it can take thesame quantifier _expression_ as the general case. |