In a message dated 2/9/2002 11:09:53 AM Central Standard Time, jjllambias@hotmail.com writes:I don't remember what you thought of: I hated it, for all the reasons that I dislike this one -- a free floating indirect question doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't have a truth value, so can't be atached truth functionally. <Which naturally leads to: mi ta te vecnu ije xukau ta kargu I buy it, whetherever it be expensive. You might want to add some kind of causality connector instead of a simple {ije}, but the second sentence is still a tautology.> No -- as I said then -- the second sentence is which is is true of P and ~P, neitehr of which is typically a tautology -- that is it is the answer to the question (if it has any truth value at all). <In English you can say tautological things like "it costs whatever it costs", which one could lojbanize as "ta se jdima makau", but it is hard to find a tautology operator to do a complete proposition> A tautology is a single sentence which is true regardless. {ta se jdima makau} , if meaningful at all, is always true but is a different sentence on different occasions, so not a tautology. "It costs whatever it costs" is just {ta se jdima lo jdima be ta}, which is a tautology. I still suspect a large number of indirect questions, so called, are relatives or, as here, descriptions. As I said, indirect questions are questions in indirect discourse and make little sense elsewhere -- English to the contrary notwithstanding (in a word, this pursuit looks to be bloated malglicotude). |