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

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

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   Okay, I agree that ko'a broda naku is the same as ko'a broda

(Hopefully that last bit was just a typo for "ko'a naku broda".)

>(if you move
> it leftwards, there is no funky qualifier or connective flipping to do (I've
> never seen it at the end of a bridi, but there is no reason why it couldn't
> be)).

Right. In fact since that sentence has no quantifiers or connectives,
all of these are equivalent:

naku ko'a broda = ko'a naku broda = ko'a broda naku = ko'a na broda =
naku broda fa ko'a = broda naku fa ko'a = broda fa ko'a naku

There is complete freedom to shuffle things around in that particular
case, since the only operator with scope is na/naku.

>    So if I understand you correctly, since naku is a term, on the same type
> of level as, but distinct from, a sumti, it behaves the same as a sumti.  It
> isn't in any way part of the selbri, whereas na is part of the selbri.  Is
> my understanding now accurate?

Sounds like it is, yes.

>  Assuming so, what you are then saying is
> despite the fact that ko'a na broda and ko'a naku broda are superficially
> similar, and (in your way of treating na) in meaning identical, they
> grammatically are not the same.

Correct.

> Therefore, although when shifting naku
> leftward from ko'a broda naku, we can say ko'a naku broda, we can't do the
> same when it's part of ko'a broda naku gi'e brode.

Right, the structure is completely different. But that's not anything
particularly special about {naku}. You can always change {ko'a broda
ko'e} to {ko'a ko'e broda}, but you can't change  {ko'a broda ko'e
gi'e brode} to {ko'a ko'e broda gi'e brode}, because then you would be
adding "ko'e" as a term to brode that it originally didn't have.

> It seems odd to me in
> the same way as your comparison of  "su'o da na broda" and   "su'o da ge na
> broda gi na broda" seemed odd to you (under my interpretation of na), but I
> concede that it is indeed so.

The difference is that it is easy to explain why naku cannot be moved
to the "shared area" of the connected bridi: it was not shared between
the two bridi to begin with. It is more difficult to understand why
{na} would stop having scope over the leading terms when the selbri is
connected with some other selbri.

>        Have I now gotten down naku?
>
>   (BTW, I like this bit of editorializing in the CLL, which you clearly
> don't agree with, indeed feel the opposite to be true:
> "Clearly, if all of Lojban negation was built on ``naku'' negation instead
> of ``na'' negation, logical manipulation in Lojban would be as difficult as
> in natural languages." ;-)

What can I say, the behaviour of {naku} is completely predictable and
what what one would expect from just looking at the syntax, even
before anyone gives any explanations. The behaviour of {na} is not.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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