Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 11:29 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

I'm not sure that using {se} like this is robust, though. There's no
formal reason that
[BAI] gi bakni gi zajba
should be equivalent to
se [BAI] gi zajba gi bakni
, even if it often is, right?

Right, it would only work for BAIs that come from a selbri with events in (only) x1 and x2. I don't know what "pu'e gi broda gi brode" means, for example. Is it equivalent to "se pu'e gi brode gi broda", "te pu'e gi brode gi broda", "ve pu'e gi brode gi broda", something else?

A lojban statement is interpreted as a proposition in the corresponding
logic, and by default the illocutionary force is to assert the truth of
the proposition. Often the assertion is spatiotemporally restricted, and
we can say that an event (of the proposition being true) is being
asserted to occur. Again, for this discussion I'll pretend (or note?)
that this is the only case to consider.

"Pretend" at most. In "ro namcu poi zmadu li re cu zmadu li pa .i se ni'i bo li ci noi zmadu li re cu zmadu li pa" there's probably no event involved.

In lojban, and I suppose in human cognition, events are things. They can
be counted and measured in various ways, and can satisfy predicates.

Yes.

A tag is interpreted as mapping an optional term to a modal operator
- something which takes formulae to formulae. The semantics of these
operators are highly miscellaneous; {ba}, {no roi}, {ja'e}, {bau} all
have quite distinct flavours.

Ideally we should be able to find common rules for families of tags, if not one rule for all of them.

Now to return to tag connectives, and to correct some mistakes I made
earlier in this thread, let me first think through again the simple case
of {[tag] gi broda gi brodu}.

Earlier I implied that this could be handled symmetrically, but that was
just wrong-headed; e.g. in {no roi gi broda gi brodu}, we're claiming an
event of broda occurs, but not so for brodu.

Must we be claiming an event of broda occurs though? Without any context, I'd tend to read it as very generic, something like "never when it brodas it brodus", or more likely in Enlish "it never brodus when it brodas", which doesn't really claim that an event of broda occurs.

So it must be something like
"an event E of broda occurs; {[tag] E brodu}".

I think it must actually be:
[tag] gi broda gi brodu
<=> su'o da tu'e da fasnu gi'e nu broda .i [tag] da brodu
, or maybe that but with {su'oi} in place of {su'o}.

(For this to make sense, {fasnu} must behave the with respect to
tense the way "occurs" does, e.g. an event which occurred in the past
fasnued then but doesn't fasnu now.)

Evidence for this being the right thing: we can rule out any "lo-style"
semantics, where some definite nu broda are involved, by considering how
the construction works in negated scope:
na ba gi broda gi brodu
should make sense, and be true, if no events of broda occur.

"It is not the case that after it brodas, it brodus". I agree that no event of broda need occur, but that's not the same as saying that we cannot talk of generic/kind "lo nu broda".

So {lo ge
nu broda gi fasnu} can't be involved, nor is it about a specific
contextually specified nu broda, nor the kind, nor anything similar that
I can think of.

I don't see that. My first interpretation would be something like "na ku lo nu brodu cu balvi lo nu broda".

Universal quantification would be silly. So by elimination of the other
natural choices, it has to be existential quantification.

That's the kind of reasoning that led to making "su'o" a default quantifier for "lo". I think postulating a hidden "su'o" is generally a bad idea.

In particular, {broda .i brodu [tag] lo nu broda} may be a handy
shorthand reformulation, but it isn't actually equivalent.

I'm now not too sure that forethought and afterthought tag connectives are completely equivalent, because given "broda .i (ku'i) no roi bo brodu" I would want to read it as "it brodas, (but) never when it brodus". But that's because I see broda as a separate sentence in the afterthought case, but not in the forethought case. It's hard not to see broda as being asserted in the afterthought case.

Now:
> broda .i [jek tag] bo brode
> -> broda .i [jek] brode [(se} tag] lo nu xu kau broda
. For simplicity, let's assume the tag is a tense (so there's no {se}).

It seems the rules for tenses are quite different than the rules for most tags:

(1) broda .i ba bo brode -> broda .i ba la'e di'u brode

(2) broda .i no roi bo brode -> broda .i go'i no roi lo nu brode

In other words, "tag bo" only affects the reading of the second connectand, or so it seems to me at this point, and tenses affect it in a different way than most other tags.

Again, if this is to work in embedded scopes, I think we need to recast
it in terms of quantification over events.

Annoyingly, I can't see a way to do that that's uniform over the
possible jeks. But e.g. for {jo}, I guess it would have to be:
da zo'u ge da fasnu
gi ga ge da nu broda gi [tag] da brode
gi ge da nu na broda gi [tag] da na brode

Is that faithful to your intention?

Let's see, this would be my current thinking:

carvi i jo glare

It rains iff it's warm.

carvi .i jo ba bo glare

It rains iff later it's warm.

(Either it rains and then later it's warm, or else it doesn't rain and then later it isn't warm.)

carvi .i jo no roi bo glare

It rains iff never when it's warm.

(Either it rains but never when it's warm, or it doesn't rain but at least once when not warm.)

I don't really know how this kind of use of q-kau works,
but I'm guessing it jumps scope like actual questions do, so can't
really be used here for this kind of thing.

I use "xu kau" as the tautology operator. A word in NA would be better, "ja'a ja na", if it were grammatical.

mu'o mi'e xorxes