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Re: [lojban] "lo no"
"is a flying tea pot" can indeed be said of nothing, i.e., "There are no flying
teapots" is a perfectly sensible (and true, I think) sentence. What can't
happen (in Lojban anyhow) is that a description referring essentially to flying
teapots, e.g., {lo [flying teapot]}, can fail to have a referent. The use of
the expression (with some restrictions -- e.g. not in an abstraction) guarantees
that such an object is in the universe of discourse. Indeed, the first use of
the expression puts it there, if it wasn't there already. That has nothing to
do, however, with whether such things exist (are truly an x1 of {zaste} [still
flying blind]). Assuming that flying teapots do not exist, how many there are
is hard to determine, since any positive integer is compatible with the
situation (of course, it is hard to determine even if flying teapots do exist,
since there may be non-existent flying teapots as well).
["cardinals other than zero" is, of course, definable -- you just did -- but
after a certain point it is unclear what its members are exactly, e.g, what
aleph-one is, other than the cardinality of the first ordinal greater than
aleph-zero]
----- Original Message ----
From: tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, May 17, 2011 6:35:20 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] "lo no"
On 16 May 2011 13:13, Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> No, I am not asking you to arbitrarily make one up. I am asking you to
> think about exactly how many trained assassing I am sending your way,
> because all of them are deadly. (And if you think the answer is more than
> zero, that says a lot more about your paranoia then it does about lojban
> quanitifers.)
I already addressed that confusion of yours. Linguistic reference does
not hinge upon physical reality. You can make reference to some flying
teapot which doesn't physically exist or which you don't believe
physically exists. Since "is-flying-teapot" cannot say of nothing but
something, anything with the property "is-flying-teapot" is
necessarily of more than zero cardinality. When you say "I'm sending
the trained assassins your way", you are linguistically referring to
some non-zero entity; but I don't here have to assume that the
referred entity has a physical factual correlate (such an assumption
depends on the pragmatics, not syntax or semantics, of your statement,
and I'm informed by that pragmatics that you may not be stating a
physical reality).
>> "three things" differ from "zero thing" primarily in that
>> they are both individually and collectively something as opposed to
>> nothing; and so on. As far as cardinality is concerned, the difference
>> between "zero" and "some" is more primitive than the difference
>> between "zero" and positive integers. The fact that "some" can be
>> meaningful in primitive terms of "non-zero" rather than of such
>> particulars as "one" or "three", warrants the act of making reference
>> to something with no provision for its specific total quantity.
>
> It may not be integers, but I would think you defnitely have to be
> positive reals, at the very least in order to qualify "some". (su'o)
You don't always need to be able to qualify "some" with an exact
number, especially when what's at stake is the primitive difference of
something from nothing. There are cases when a reference to
"non-nothing" is more meaningful than to "three things", for instance.
Suppose I want to change the paint of the walls of my room by today's
evening -- "I'm going to give them a new coat of paint":
mi ba punji lo cinta lo bitmu
What's important for me is that the walls will have different paint
than the current one -- whether one material or three hundred
materials of paints, not important. Not only I'm unconcerned with the
number of lo cinta to be applied, also this number is factually
undetermined; not only I don't subjectively know how many lo cinta I'm
going to use, also there is no objective answer to "lo xo cinta" as of
now. It might even turn out that the wall wouldn't after all change by
the evening because I had been too busy doing other things or I
changed my own mind. Would these factors affect my reference to lo
cinta? Would I have made a meaningless statement by "mi ba punji lo
cinta lo bitmu" just because I epistemologically couldn't set a
specific cardinality for lo cinta? Would I have meant nothing by "lo
cinta" just because it eventually turned out to be none? No:
regardless of the physical reality, my sumti did refer to the concept
of some paint. The term "lo cinta" was primitively meaningful by
virtue of the reference to non-nothing, without any exact number as a
subjective or objective answer to "lo xo cinta".
>> In Lojban, only "no" can exactly quantify nothing, and all non-"no"
>> cardinalities can be defined by means of contrast to "no": "nonai". If
>> I had to fill the inner quantifier for "no lo xo broda" from your
>> example, I might say "nonai".
>
> There's no such grammatical contruct,
no nai = PA NAI or PA UI = PA*
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=zasni+gerna+cenba+vreji
"NAI: Extended its grammar to that of indicators, i.e. it is allowed
after any word."
"nonai" would have the composite meaning of "other than zero". And the
set of cardinal numbers which are "other than zero" seem more than
undefinable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number
> but again, I would hate to think
> that you can mean by that negatives, or imaginary numbers.
"PA mei" never means a negative or imaginary number, insofar as the
interlocuters properly understand what cardinality is about.
Such 'restrictive' compositions exist in other parts of the language.
For example, we don't say "ci lo pa gerku", because, however
syntactically valid, "ci" makes no sense in the composition that it's
in. Likewise, we shouldn't assume "nonai mei" could mean negatives or
imaginary numbers, because such are never to be in the scope set by
"mei" in its compositional relation to the preceding PA.
mu'o
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