Re: [lojban] Whatever

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 8/5/2001 5:17:19 PM Central Daylight Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes:

Let's consider first a ju-sentence:

     mi ba te vecnu ta iju ta rupnu makau
     I will buy that, whatever it costs.

In other words, whatever the answer to "how much does that
cost?" is, I will buy it. This works because ju prevents
the second sentence from being a claim. A claim could never
contain makau because nothing would be claimed, or rather,
it becomes a tautology, since obviously the true answer to
the question, whatever it is, has to be true.

{xukau} is indeed the tautology marker, so {da'au} is not
necessary. Since ju by itself changes whatever follows into
a tautology, it is not necessary to use xukau there, but it
doesn't hurt either:

What a horrible way to put it! Sentences after {ju} make claims; the claims
they make just have no role to play in the larger sentence.  Nor are
sentences after {ju} thereby tautologies.  They act like tautolgies in
conjunctions, to be sure -- but they equally act like contradictions in
disjunctions.  And, since U is neither a conjunction nor a disjunction, the
sentences following it are neither tautologies nor contradictions -- by being
after {ju}.  Nor is {xukau} a tautology marker, though {xukau p} may always
be true.  But it is, in fact, either p or ~p, neither of which is (generally
speaking) a tautology.  Similarly for a sentence containing {makau} (if such
make sense)--  they may be true but they are not tautologies (and they may be
problematic even to truth until we find what fills the {makau} slot).
The examples with attitudinals are more plausible, except that we don't
understand attitudinals very well, so this may be ignotum per ignotius, and
they seem to be sayable without the indirect questions -- assuming (which I
do with great reluctance) that I understand what they are meant to mean.