Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 9:45 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

I don't see it that way at all. It's the same rule. It's just that the
rule is applying to the implicit sub-bridi of the description clause; in
general it applies to the immediately enclosing bridi (just like any
other bridi operator, e.g. tenses).

(I'm not particularly happy with this "bridi" and "sub-bridi"
terminology, btw, though I hope you can see what I mean by it; feel free
to suggest alternatives)

Well, we know for sure how the operator "ko'a .e ko'e" operates when it occupies the place of an argument of an atomic predicate: It outputs the conjuntion of the two atomic formulas created by using "ko'a" and "ko'e" respectively as the argument of the atomic predicate.

When "ko'a .e ko'e" occupies some other place (e.g. the argument of a function LAhE) we cannot apply the above rule directly. We need to either say how "ko'a .e ko'e" operates when it occupies the argument of an atomic function (which to me implies a new rule, even if the rule is very similar to the rule for when it occupies the place of an atomic predicate) or we can say that there are no atomic functions, all functions are in fact built out of predicates. In this case, we just need to express the function in terms of a predicate, and then apply the rule we already have for "ko'a .e ko'e" as a pseudo-argument of an atomic predicate.

> LE [quantifier] [sumti] is interesting. I think I never actually gave
> much thought to "lo re lo mlatu .e ci lo gerku" having such a very
> unintuitive parse.

So it does... I guess to get the "lo (re lo mlatu .e ci lo gerku)", you
have to use
lo tu'o boi re lo mlatu .e ci lo gerku
?

I suppose. I guess with ".a" it would make more sense: "lo po'i ga re mei gi'e me lo mlatu gi ci mei gi'e me lo gerku".

Perhaps "lo tu'o lo ractu .e lo datka" could describe this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit%E2%80%93duck_illusion

> I have no idea what the rules for mekso are in detail, so I don't know

> whether for example "li na'u sinso mo'e ko'a .e ko'e" is supposed to be
> equivalent to "lo sinso be ko'a .e ko'e" or to "li na'u sinso mo'e ko'a
> lo'o .e li na'u sinso mo'e ko'e". I would like to say (not too adamantly)
> that it's the first, which doesn't require an additional rule for ".e", but
> you are probably interpreting as the second.

I am, which doesn't require an additional rule for ".e" ;)

But actually, I don't understand that example. What is the operand
{mo'e ko'a .e ko'e} such that sine of it is something which is sine of
both ko'a and ko'e?

Is "mo'e ko'a .e ko'e" an operand, or just a pseudo-operand (morphologically an operand, but logically not an operand, like "ko'a .e ko'e" is morphologically a sumti, but logically not a sumti)?

We cannot claim that the rule for operand-3 always returns true logical operands, in the way that we could claim that sumti-6 (almost) always returns true logical sumti. "gek operand gik operand-3" is an operand-3, for example. So, I would not want to insist that "mo'e ko'a .e ko'e" is a logical operand, and indeed in my example I was not taking it as one. Since sumti and operands are logically the same thing, I was just ignoring "mo'e" and "li", and the question was whether "ko'a .e ko'e" operates on the predicate "sinso" or on the predicate containing the li-clause as its argument.

> > > Do we even know what "na ku zo'u broda .i bo brode" means?
> > I believe it's the same as "na ku ge broda gi brode".
>
> I suppose that's one choice, although it's not a necessity that
> juxtaposition be equated with conjunction, or that the negation of two
> separate propositions has to be the negation of their conjunction.

Is there a plausible alternative?

Well, I'm not advocating this but we know that "na ku zo'u broda" expresses the negation of the proposition expressed by "broda", so it would not be out of the question to say that "na ku zo'u tu'e broda .i brode tu'u" expresses the negations of both propositions, rather than just the negation of their conjunction. The operator "na ku zo'u" is only well defined when applied to a single proposition. When applied to multiple propositions at once, who knows how we want it to act. Maybe it should be distributive.

mu'o mi'e xorxes