Re: [lojban] "He didn't start to paint until he was thirty"

[Felipe Gonçalves Assis <felipeg.assis@gmail.com>]

On 17 October 2012 06:06, Escape Landsome <escaaape@gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, I find this a little confusing.   Not starting to do something
> has nothing to do with beginning, even "UNTIL".
>

It has, at a pragmatic level. That is, if he hadn't start painting until he was
forty, the speaker would have told so. Since he didn't, the sentence "He didn't
start to paint until he was forthy" should be false. This is called a scalar
implicature.

> How do Lojban handle this kind of thing ?

This is independent of language. It is about how you can infer things based
on the assumption that the interlocutor is a collaborative communicator.

(Now, I don't know what the japanese sentence litterally means, and why
it would be translated to English that way.)

mu'o
mi'e .asiz.

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