[lojban] Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: About the negators

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

The claim to be spoken predicate logic has always been a bit of a Loglan/Lojban joke, second only perhaps to the claim to be a tool for testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.The lack of clear usable scope rules -- right hand end problems -- is only one of many deviations, trivial and major.  Most of the deviances are said to arise from the demands of actual languages in use.  This is a questionable claim, but, if true, could bre accomodated in many other ways than the current versions (some maybe even simpler or more usable),  Since scope is not -- in Lojban -- a syntactic category, the problems here do not affect the claim or unambiguousness, but do create other sorts of ambiguity.



----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 7:21:17 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: About the negators

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   I suggest this conversation has now grown well beyond the limits of
> lojban-beginners list.

(I am responding in lojban-list.)

> Suffice it to say that while the use of na is
> well-defined in simple bridi, its meaning in very complicated sentence with
> both existential qualifiers and bridi tails is not well-defined.

If {su'o da na broda gi'e brode} counts as a "very complicated
sentence", then the characterization of Lojban as "spoken predicate
logic" is almost a sham. The relative scopes of quantifiers, logical
connectives and negation should be very straightforward.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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