Re: [lojban] Lessons

[Rob Speer <rob@twcny.rr.com>]

On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 02:43:12PM -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
> On Thu, 24 May 2001, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 02:15:26PM -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > > On Thu, 24 May 2001 pycyn@aol.com wrote:
> > >
> > > > In a message dated 5/23/2001 8:03:49 PM Central Daylight Time,
> > > > nicholas@uci.edu writes:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > > My current thinking, btw, is that forethought
> > > > > connectives are not worth mentioning in an introductory course, as they
> > > > > are too infrequently used.
> > > > >
> > > > But they are so tidy and clear as opposed to the infix ("now negate the
> > > > sentence you just received") and so natural for "if"
> > >
> > >
> > > Nick, I hope you're teaching the newbies to use "va'o" for what they think
> > > "if, then" is, instead of "ganai, gi" or whatever the misleading
> > > formal-logic conditional is.
> >
> > You might recall that not all of us agree that the formal-logic
> > conditional is misleading.
> >
> > Those of you who felt that it was never seemed to be able to come up
> > with a clearer argument then, "Well, it just is.  So there.".
> 
> 
> 
> No! I had no idea anybody was yet unconvinced! Please, go back and search
> for "subjunctive" in the archives, and get convinced. There are very clear
> arguments in there.

I'm worried. "Subjunctive" implies to me that we're taking a natural language
structure and trying to force it into Lojban, in place of a logical structure.

When I last brought up this argument (over ijo/go and not ijanai/ganai), nobody
actually gave a reason why "ijo" would be wrong, and it seemed to me that the
consensus was that it's a matter of style what you use to connect ideas.
-- 
Rob Speer