[lojban] Re: lojban ills: implicit emphasis

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Well, I translated Schoenfinkel for my German
comp, so I don't work as well with Curry et al. 
But, as I think about it, none of this really
quite works in any case: (C a b c) gives (a(c
b)), that is the two "arguments" after a are in
fact one argument, the application of c to b, not
two separate arguments as the application of a to
both c and b or to c and b together.  So nothing
much works right here, but at least with
normalized syntax (which is perfectly legal in
Lojban:  {tavla fa mi do} (the {fa} is not
strictly required but is much clearer than
without)) {se} function like C in the ordering,
but not in the grouping: {tavla fa mi do} is
either {(tavla fa mi) do} or {tavla <fa mi do>}
(where the <> is another function -- whose
standard version I forget -- for creating an
ordered pair out of a 2-sequence of functors). 
Neither of these is something that is easily
given in CL (I think) but in there somewhere
since computable. I wish I could remember more of
what happeened in that old paper (or who wrote
it, for that matter) since I remember it as being
pretty straightforward on various kinds of tanru
and only slightly nonstandard (left associating? 
-- I can't remember the function for that
either).

- Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
> 
> ****
> Hoops!  C converts <abc> into <acb>, not <bac>,
> so {se} is fairly complex too.  C is Lojban's
> (never used) {setese}.
> 
> ****
> 
> Yes, you're right; I was thinking of the
> normalized predicate-logic rather than
> syntactic-string representation of Lojban
> semantics ;)  [although I failed to say so --
> oops]
> 
> E.g., 
> 
> mi tavla do
> 
> is equivalent to the predicate logic formula
> 
> (tavla) (mi) (do)
> 
> (using combinatory-logic curried notation)
> which is equivalent to
> 
> (C tavla) (do) (mi)
> 
> using the C combinator.
> 
> Using combinators on the syntactic-string
> representation of Lojban is a bit screwy
> because of the arbitrariness of the placement
> of the predicate in the argument list according
> to Lojban syntax.
> 
> -- Ben
> 
> 
>