On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:01 PM, 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.
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
Umm... actually, no, not under the CLL. (although xorxes disagrees with their definition of bridi negation). The following transforms are true:
no da broda --> ro da na'e broda
ro da na broda -> su'o da na'e 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 rien.
("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"?
Either "mi viska no da" or "mi na viska su'o da". "mi na viska ro da" means it's not true that you see EVERYTHING, there are some things you don't see.
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.
Have already done so. Numerous times.
>> 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"?
The zasni gerna cenba vreji page is NOT xorlo. They are only xorxes' additional proposed expansions to the grammar.
>>
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.
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".
a) you weren't restricting nonai use with mei. But again, saying something should mean less than does when used in certain ways is falling into natlang traps that we should be trying to avoid.
b) This may be opening up another can of worms, but I'm not convinced that pimu shouldn't be allowed with mei. If I am speaking of a number of oranges, why can't I have a half of one? And from that universe of one half orange, I can talk about a smaller amount. pipa lo pimu najnimre cu fusra
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".
But we aren't talking about defaults. We are talking about explicitnesses... weren't we? So if you believe it has to be at least one, su'o would do fine (although it still won't inherently restrict it to integers)
--gejyspa