On Monday, January 28, 2013 8:23:39 PM UTC+4, clifford wrote:Well, I think what we seriously need is some logic lessons.
How do you imagine children born by parents speaking Lojban taking logic lessons?
Give examples from real life and you are done.I don't think that all the problems have been solved (and for some I don't see how to solve them in Lojban)Do you know how to solve them somewhere? In xorban/tokipona/Navaho/language of penguins?--, but things are not nearly as muddled as some people persist in claiming. that being said, a number of examples would be helpful to make the points already established clear and forceful to all.
On Monday, January 28, 2013 7:24:39 PM UTC+4, clifford wrote:Yes, let's do get this away from Aesop (does anyone remember what the connection was?) and stick to meddlesome quantifiers and operators.To start. 1) "any" is fairly peculiar to English (and related languages) but it seems that all its logical roles are related to scope issues, whether the scope at variance with the quantifier's, conditional or imperative or intensional. Lojban doesn't do the scopes other than the propositional ones well (hardly at all), so we are left to context or jury-rigging: how do we indicate that the "an apple" is best scoped as within, rather than outside the command (and the underlying intensional bit about what would happen were I to get an apple or were my request to be acted upon positively)? Tossing {tu'a}s around, while justifiable, seems inelegant at best.2. Yes, {le} makes purely denotative terms (God, how that phrase brings back seminars and symposia of old). It is pragmatically urged that the predicate involved be somehow connected to the object in the view of the other participants than the speaker but that is not strictly required. a le phrase points to a particular definite (or is it specific?) thing (in the xorlo sense) and just that, so that thing must be in UD, but is otherwise not restricted.3. As I have said, the main feature of {lo} is salience. A lo phrase refers to the things with the indicated property that currently are of interest -- including bringing them to our attention as one possible way. What things is quite open to contextual determination: {lo broda} may, depending on context, refer to the physical mass of all brodas, or the class of them or some subclass or or broda alone or various chunks of one or several brodas taken separately or en masse. There are various auxiliary devices (not all well-developed) for disambiguating if context doesn't work.4 Neither {le} nor {lo} correlate in any regular way to English "the" or "a", though, because of salience, repeated {lo broda} comes to be "the" regularly.5. But {lo} is always bad for "any" because salience -- or any specifying factor -- is just what "any" does not have.
My suggestion is that we create a list of many many examples and each lojbanist is given opportunity to translate them.Otherwise this problem will never be solved. Probably people here don't understand what all those terms like "specific" or "salience" or other terms. vau zo'onaiYes, seriously i dont remember when i started that thread on "any". Long ago. No solution that has been approved by at least 90% of lojbanists.The same questions and answers arise again and again.We need a huge list of examples.mu'o
From: la gleki <gleki.is...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2013 8:04 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Aesop's "The Wolf and the Crane"
On Monday, January 28, 2013 5:53:47 PM UTC+4, tsani wrote:FWIW, I recall the CLL mentioning that using lo and le in a manner analogous to "a" and "the", for back-referencing, is bad. I'm just not sure how many of you will agree with the CLL. (Also, I can't be bothered to look it up.){lo} *can* refer to things in context, and have definite referents. It's the *generic* article in the sense that we *don't know* if it's being definite or indefinite. The definite-indefinite distinction seems to slowly be dying in IRC Lojban, which is -- I'd wager -- where the majority of "spoken" Lojban happens. If there is such a thing as conversational Lojban, it's on IRC.As for the "any" discussion, I'm slowly beginning to see the merits of sisku2 as a property. If we use a simple article plus a selbri, we invoke {zo'e} and somewhere, there are definite referents that appear. {.i mi sisku lo plise} has the awful problem of having semi-definite referents (quantifierless {lo} doesn't actually need to for strange xorlo reasons). However, assuming xorlo strangeness doesn't happen, the formal definition says we can plug in {zo'e noi ke'a plise} (the formal definition should change, IMVHO, to reflect the fact that {lo} can be quite bullshit-y.) -> {.i mi sisku zo'e noi ke'a plise}. Here's the proof that actual referents appear. {zo'e} has referents. Now, if any apple will do, there *shouldn't* be referents. Now, maybe it's possible to hack our way around this with {da}-magics, but it seems like invoking the property that is being searched for is a more succinct solution, as -- and here's the important part -- *any* object satisfying that predicate will work.I haven't really analysed this to a greater degree that might suggest that using properties can most of the time / always work. I think however that exploring this possibility is worthwhile, unless we all get our facts straight about xorlo. (As it is, everyone has their own interpretation. Please don't say otherwise. In fact, I used to think I knew what I was talking about when I said "xorlo", but I realise that I don't. I used to think I agreed with certain people about xorlo, but I realise that I don't.).i mi'e la tsani mu'oP.S. if this is going to degenerate into a full-blown discussion about articles and scopes and everything awful in the world, shouldn't we make a new topic?Yes, let's close the topic and continue where we left last time.
Other similar topics:Discussion of {da} https://groups.google.com/ forum/#!topic/lojban/ wtp1pNm8NvcDiscussion of {da} https://groups.google. com/forum/#!topic/lojban/R1- Bi8p_xmgQuantifier exactness https://groups. google.com/forum/#!topic/ lojban/cJHKEf8kE3Q
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