[lojban] Re: Denoting counterfactual sentences in Lojban?

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 05:54:33PM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote:
> Hopefully someone on this list can clear things up for me.  I have
> one significant question -- how to represent hypothetical
> sentences 

da'i, or put it in an abstraction; all abstractions are technically
non-veridical.

> First, consider Exercise 7, part 2:
> 
> "Susan assumes that Zhang knows that Susan is late."

la .susan. sruma lo du'u la .zang. djuno lo du'u la .susan. lerci

> The translation given in the answer key is:
> 
> .i la suzyn. sruma lenu la jan. djuno lenu lerci fa lenu la suzyn.
> klama

Whether to use nu or du'u is stylistic, for the most part, in this
case.

> Now, this is OK but personally I find it a bit annoying.  I found
> myself wanting to do instead something like
> 
> .i lenu la suzyn. klama cu lerci     ("The event of Susan coming is late")
> .i la jan jimpe go'i   ("Zhang knows the previous.")
> .i la suzyn. sruma lenu go'i    ("Susan assumes the previous.")
> 
> or else replacing the last of the three sentences with

You're certainly welcome to if you like.  It seems obnoxiously
verbose to me, however.

> .i ra srumo lenu go'i (using "ra" to refer to "Susan", pretty
> obviously in context)

Use "sy" to refer to Susan.

> However, I don't yet know how to mark the second utterance in this
> chain as hypothetical, so that the listener knows I don't really
> believe Zhang knows the previous, I'm just saying that Susan
> assumes so.  IN other words, I want to say
> 
> .i la jan HYP jimpe go'i   ("Zhang knows the previous.")

da'i

Alos pe'i, ti'a, .ia.  Probably some others.

> I don't like
> 
> .i la lojban HYP mintu le glibau
> 
> because this is a posited equivalence between two entities of
> different types, it seems semantically incorrect even though it
> may (?) be syntactically allowable.

You mean because it equates a cmene and a lujvo?  It doesn't matter;
they are both names, because of la.  It's the referents that matter.

gliban, btw.

-Robin

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