Re: Dao De Jing [was Re: Promoting Lojban]

[Lin Zhemin <ljm@ljm.qqjane.net>]

Mon, 22 Feb 1999, la xod(xod@bway.net) cusku di'e
> still permits sentences which violate logic, like the two-headed cow
> example.

But why do you think the "two-headed cow" is illogic?
To me, it's logic, as we have some mythology about "two-headed snack",
"nine-headed dragon".

> Illogical statements are hard for everybody to understand.

Maybe there are some intercultural problems. Illogical statements are
very easily _accepted_ for (at least) Chinese people, and peoples
influented by Chinese culture. Maybe it's due to the language. We
tended to eliminate many words in one sentence in ancient time. Like
some religious sentences like:
	No outside, no inside.

which means:
1)There isn't something called "outside", nor "inside"
2)Nothing's outside, nothing's inside.
3)The status of someone(something) is neither outside nor inside.

But all the translations lost something original. However, it's quite
acceptable to (at least) Chinese people. People in Lojbanistan may feel
hard understanding this sentence {[da zo'u] da nalbartu .i da nalne'i}.
And adding [da zo'u] for the grammaticalisation violates some original
meaning.

> "lo nanmu cu ninmu" is valid lojban. No parser will reject it. It follows
> the same pattern as "lo nanmu cu xekri". But it's illogical!
> (unambigiously so!)

Such sentence can be translatted in Chinese, as
	n"uren ye shi nanren. (Women also-are men).

Well, in some philosophical books, such sentence appears often, 'cause
the structure of Chinese grammar permits doing so. We'd suppose there
are something omitted before/after the sentence, like
	(zon zhege guandian kanlai,) n"uren ye shi nanren
	(From this point of view), women are also men.

So it is never illogical (but somewhat ambiguous) in Chinese. I know
that it is definitely illogical in Lojban (since you've used {lo}),
though. But what about {da poi nanmu zo'u da ninmu} ?
:-)

-- 

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