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Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like
Jorge Llambías wrote:
On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Bob LeChevalier, President and
Founder - LLG <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
Well, CAhA was certainly not intended to be the category "modal-logical
operators", and BAI was originally intended to include all of the pure
modals, since the insight from the JCB era was that linguistically the
modals and case tags/sumti tcita could be used in grammatically
interchangeable ways (we didn't think too much about semantic differences,
only grammatical ones). The intent at that point was that ni'i used as a
modal would handle logical necessity, and its possible use as a sumti tag
was consistent with this meaning. BAI has evolved over the years, and is
much more strongly associated with the place structures of the associated
gismu per the fi'o equivalence, and this may have lost something from the
intended modals that are among the set of BAI.
What were the other intended modals among the BAIs besides "ni'i"?
Since I was largely oblivious of the concept of "modal" when I
reinvented the cmavo, having only recognized that JCB had made them
grammatically identical to sumti tcita and used them as such, I would
simply look at the list of modals that JCB identified in Loglan 1, and
pick out the Lojban equivalent (and there is one for each of them)
Consider these two sentences:
(1) ka'e ku no da klama lo tersla
(2) no da ka'e klama lo tersla
I would translate them as "it's possible nobody comes to the party"
and "nobody can come to the party" respectively. The first one is
clearly not about capability, and the second one may be about
capability but probably just circumstantial rather than innate.
> If I understand your position correctly, you would understand them
> both as the implausible "nobody is innately capable of coming to the
> party".
I don't agree with your translation of the first one, which I see as
being just a rearrangement of the second one. The meaning of the second
probably is affected by xorlo, but pre-xorlo with le tersla I would have
understood it as "Nothing could have come to the party".
Which brings to mind that the glico word (which I think is a modal) that
I associate with kakne is "could have", recognizing that in English, the
distinction between can and may often is more associated with capability
vs permission rather than capability vs possibility
And in order to express my meanings with a modal you would
have to go with something like:
(1') na ku ni'i ku na ku no da klama lo tersla
>
> (2') no da na ku ni'i ku na ku klama lo tersla
I would express "it's possible nobody comes to the party" as "cumki fa
lo nu noda klama le tersla", and "nobody can come to the party" as your
(2) (noting the malrarna interpretation of noda as nobody rather than
nothing)
I don't see how logical necessity enters into the question at all, so I
cannot interpret your two prime examples into any kind of standard English.
1' It is not the case that some unspecified logic necessitates that
nothing comes to a party.
2' Nothing is not (logically necessarily not coming to a party) - the
noda and naku have become prenex-like
which can be simplified a bit by noting that "na ku no da" = "su'o da"
and "no da na ku" = "ro da",
I thought "naku noda" = "ro da", but I may be half asleep. I'm not sure
of your version.
so:
(1'') na ku ni'i ku su'o da klama lo tersla
It is not the case that (logically) necessarily someone comes to a party.
(2'') ro da ni'i ku na ku klama lo tersla
Everything (logically) necessarily is not coming to a party.
"it is not necessarily the case that someone comes to the party" and
"everyone is necessarily not coming to the party".
The problem of using "ni'i" for "necessarily" though is that it may
interfere with its other use for logical entailment.
What other meaning of necessarily are you trying to convey other than
logical entailment (with no specified logic).
Maybe I am simply failing to grasp what you mean by "necessarily"
>"te sau" is a slightly better candidate,
That is another meaning of "necessarily", I agree
if it weren't for the x2 of "sarcu".
Since tersau refers to the x3 of sarcu, I am not sure how x2 is
relevant. If I were to re-express the sentence using sarcu, x2 would
probably be the bridi that is dependent. x1 seems more problematical,
since the meat of the claim is in the x3.
But remember that BAI wasn't originally fi'o broda, at least not
strictly - that was a later insight that allowed us to clarify the use
and semantics of BAI as a class. The assignment of modals into BAI might
have suffered from that, if we chose the wrong broda for the modals in BAI.
I just (finally) looked up modal logic in Wikipedia to perhaps gain some
context. They use two sample sentences:
In a classical modal logic, each can be expressed by the other with
negation:
...
it is possible that it will rain today if and only if it is not
necessary that it will not rain today;
and
it is necessary that it will rain today if and only if it is not
possible that it will not rain today.
It seems to me that we have a greater problem in Lojban expressing that
sense of "possible" than we do "necessary", since "possible" for me has
never excluded "necessary". It certainly is the case that we did not
consider modal logic of this sort in designing Lojban (well, I cannot
say that pc did not, but I don't think he communicated it to me).
Most of the focus was on concepts that dated to Aristotle (noting that
my knowledge of what that means is somewhat less than my knowledge of
"logic"); pc often referred to how Aristotle discussed/divided matters
in his discussions.
Looking further, and without having dug into the ancient correspondence
yet, I think CAhA had more to do with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality
than with modal logic, with ca'a being Aristotle's actuality and ka'e
being his potentiality, though the discussion there gets far more
complex than what we talked about with CAhA.
--
Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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