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Re: [lojban] "lo no"
."No flying teapots exist" is a weaker claim than"There are no flying teapots", since there might be flying teapots in the domain of discourse, but none in the extension of "exists". As to what to do about "nothing", there is the useful bit in Alice, cited in CLL, to show the problems of taking "nothing" to be the name of something. On the other hand, there is Fridegesis (sp?) who noted it must be the name of a very big something, since God made the world out of nothing, and look how big it is!
Sent from my iPad
On May 18, 2011, at 16:01, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 May 2011 14:54, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> "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.
>
> Does "There are no flying teapots" really say of nothing? I think it
> says of "flying teapots". It means "no flying teapots exist", where
> "flying teapots" is quantified with "no" and predicated with "exist".
>
>
> On 17 May 2011 13:11, Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I say you CAN say "is-flying-teapot" of a nothing.
>
> "Nothing is a flying teapot"? I take notice of how it's convertible
> into an expression that says of something: "Everything is not a flying
> teapot". The same conversion is possible in Lojban:
>
> no da broda --> ro da na broda
>
> If it weren't for this parallel -- if without an underlying
> non-nothing subject --, "nothing is a flying teapot" would have been
> nonsensical, I think. "no da broda" (saying of nothing) is neither
> true nor false independent of "ro da na broda" (saying of something).
> Can a predicate be true of absolutely nothing?
>
> Besides, I wonder if the form of "no da broda" is as much common as
> the form of "ro da na broda" among natural languages. Spanish "nada"
> and French "rien" can each mean "anything" rather than "nothing"
> depending on the verb's negativity.
>
> No veo nada.
> Je ne vois
> ("I do not see anything." rather than "I see nothing".)
>
> Should these be translated as "mi viska no da" or "mi na viska ro da"?
>
> Japanese has no equivalent form to "no da broda" (nothing is/does
> ...). They do have words for the concepts of nothingness, but they
> never use them as the subject of a positive proposition which is
> expressible in its negative parallel:
>
> nani-ka mie-ru --> nani-mo mie-nai.
> (zo'e se viska --> zo'e na se viska)
>
> This is how they would translate the English "I see nothing". "nani"
> means "anything" indicatively and "what" interrogatively, but never
> "nothing".
>
>
>> I am not going to argue this point
>> anymore, because you understand what I am saying, and I understand what you
>> are saying. No point in going round and round here. Anymore sentences you
>> say on this exact point will be ignored, but do not think that the fact of
>> my ignoring them means I agree with you. It just means I'm sick of the same
>> points being raised again and again, as if repetition is a valid rhetorical
>> style to get something across.
>
> You could help save my repetitive effort to see the supposed logic of
> your "lo no broda" by deconstructing what you identify as its 'two
> claims' into proper predicative Lojban expressions. The same point
> down below.
>
>
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>> In the last case you have not put paint on the walls, or to put it another
>> way, you have put "lo no cinta {of the paint you actually put on the walls}"
>> on the walls (or "no lo {whatever amount you intended to put} cinta" on the
>> walls. The statements mean two different things, but refer to the same end
>> result in the physical word)
>
> Why don't you expand the two sumti into clear Lojban bridi so that we
> can more accurately diagnose their logical viability? Here's my take
> (incorporating xorxes' suggestion):
>
> lo no cinta {of the paint you actually put on the walls}
> --> zo'e noi cinta {poi mi ca'a punji ke'a lo bitmu ku'o} gi'e nomei
>
> no lo {whatever amount you intended to put} cinta
> --> no da poi 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:
>>
>> But that page is not canon. That's xorxes' proposed extension of the
>> grammar.
>
> What canonical or more-acceptable-than-xorlo sources support your
> argument for "lo no broda"?
>
>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> That's fine. Like I said, if you are wiling to restrict its domain in
>> that way, I have no problem with that. But we already HAVE a construct that
>> means that, za'uno So you don't have to reinvent the wheel. "nonai" would
>> include things like ka'o and ni'ure.
>
> To the extent that "za'uno" too can mean non-integers like "pimu",
> though, it too would have to be subjected to the said semantic
> restriction when used with "mei". So "za'uno" wouldn't be functionally
> different from "nonai".
>
> I suggested "nonai" because: the sense of negation seemed more
> appropriate for my response to your argument for "no"; and I wanted to
> emphasize the contrast between nothing and something (non-nothing).
>
>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>>
>> But like I said, if you mean "greater than zero", than SAY that, not
>> "non-zero".
>
> In the context of cardinality, "greater than zero" basically means "at
> least one", and "su'o" would thereby be neater than "za'uno". But I
> wanted to avoid that line of positive expressions, because earlier
> comments (especially by xorxes) suggested that "su'o" may not be
> considered a default inner quantifier for "lo broda".
>
>
> mu'o
>
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