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

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Now let's consider just {su'o da na broda}. The obvious prenex
>> rewriting, if we hadn't read of any special rule, is:
>
>   That last sentence sets up an interesting straw man -- First, it uses a
> word, "obvious".  Obvious to whom?  To those who expect na to behave the
> same as naku?

No, I mean obvious from looking at the parse tree, without
preconceptions. Syntactically {na} is part of the bridi tail, and it
is not, in general, the operator of the bridi-tail with widest scope.
So in general the scope of {na} is already conditioned by the other
operators in the bridi-tail and cannot be changed. Only in the very
special case when {na} has widest scope over the bridi-tail can the
issue even arise of giving it even wider scope than just its natural
scope over the bridi-tail. And no justiication is ever given for that
move.

>   No generic statements about obviousness can be made with regard to lojban,
> especially if one encounters na as their first negation.  Which, if you read
> the CLL through as your first exposure to lojban, as I did, is in fact what
> happens.  The "naku" comes a whole chapter later.  And how is it first
> encountered?  By saying that a bridi that includes a na can be rewritten as
> a prenex with "naku" all the way on the left, and then proceeds to explain
> how to move it around etc.  So to me, the use of "na" as described in CLL is
> natural, and the way want to rewrite it is unnatural.

Yes, I understand that. That's how CLL presents it. But without that
arbitrary rule, which may seem natural to you because it's how {na}
was introduced to you, there is nothing natural about it. The other
interpretation is what follows naturally when no violence is done to
the formal grammar.

>     So it's not that the na "jumps the su'o".  It's that na is defined that
> way, and naku is a special subcase of na that works quite differently.

{naku} is not relevant to the issue. Fortunately there is no
disagrement about the scope of {naku} which agrees with what can be
read from the parse tree and thus can't cause problems.

> I'd've personally been a lot happier if they had created an entirely
> different cmavo for "naku" rather than modifying na in a way that is
> counterintuitive to the way it normally works (or the way things like
> tense+KU works, for example).  If they had a completely different cmavo, I
> doubt we'd be having this argument.

I don't think you are adressing the argument I'm giving, which has
nothing to do with {naku}.

Compare:

(1) su'o da na broda

(2) su'o da ge na broda gi na brode

There's no {naku} in sight. (2) cannot mean anything other than "some
x is neither broda nor brode". It is unnatural for (1) comparing it
with (2), to mean something other than "some x is not broda".

Even better, compare (1) with:

(3) su'o da ge na broda gi na broda

This can only mean "some x is not broda and is not broda", which
reduces to "some x is not broda".

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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