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Re: [lojban] Re: Reasoning by analogy

On 2020-12-19 18:14, scope845hlang343jbo@icebubble.org wrote:


Jacob Thomas Errington <jake@mail.jerrington.me> writes:


Often times when translating from English to Lojban, it turns out that
a conjunction such as "just like" winds up being the main claim of the
Lojban. In this case, I'd translate as:

I've suspected that for a while, but had never seen it mentioned
anywhere, outright.  I'm glad to see it confirmed.  :) The only way I've
been able to translate sentences such as "I'm stronger than you." has
been to (like you suggest) express the comparison as the main selbri,
i.e., {mi do zmadu le ni tsali}.

     "You can learn to walk on your hands just like you learn to walk on
      your feet."

      lo xance ce'o da lo jamfu ce'o da cu simsa lo ka ka'e cilre fu da
      fi lo nu do cadzu fi ce'u

Would that be right?  I don't know how to pass multiple arguments into
an abstraction (or lambda expression) in Lojban... especially when they
occupy two different levels of (nested) abstraction.
So you want to emphasize that you _learn_ each one the same way? In other words, walking on your hands and walking on your feet are similar in the way that they are learned to do. We can express this with an indirect question. 

lo xance lo jamfu cu simsa lo ka ka'e cilre fu makau fi lo nu cadzu fi ce'u
Although I think the indirect question formulation is the most natural, I think you could also formulate it in a similar way as your example with {da}:
.i da zo'u lo xance lo jamfu cu simsa lo ka ka'e cilre fu da fi lo nu cadzu fi ce'u
We don't need to pass in the variable {da}. We need to explicitly bind it outside (otherwise it would be implicitly bound inside the abstraction), but then we can simply refer to it inside. Then the interpretation is that it's the same way of learning that's applying to both instances of the abstraction (the one for feet and the one for hands).
For completeness, I want to say that actually passing in multiple things to an abstraction isn't really supported in Lojban. I wrote an article about a way to do it using a pattern-matching syntax: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Abstraction_Pattern_Syntax It requires the experimental cmavo {ce'ai}. 


I'm not sure if trying to express it using .inaja is right. In
principle, if someone knew how to walk on their hands and not on their
feet, then the same analogy would also apply to them trying to learn
to walk on their feet! So really, I think the main claim here is that
hands and feet are similar, but in a very specific way.

Right, but most people who walk do so on their feet, and few people walk
on their hands.  So, there is an implication that it's the upright
walkers who will be learning to walk upside down (on their hands).

    do ka'e cilre cei broda fu da fe lo jai ta'i nu cadzu fi lo jamfu
    .ije da simsa de
    .ije seni'i bo broda fu de fe lo jai ta'i nu cadzu fi lo xance

That sort of expresses it, but it still seems kind of clumsy.  Use of
{ni'i} is perhaps more accurate than {.inaja}.


I'm still not sure whether this means the right thing.

exists X, exists Y:
(you can learn to walk on your feet by X) AND (X is similar to Y) ==> (you can learn to walk on your hands by Y)
I'm not really sure I'd be able to interpret this to mean "You can learn to walk on your hands the same way you can learn to walk on your hands. 


Also, there's no need to copy me, as I am already on the mailing list.


Sorry about that, I mistakenly clicked reply instead of reply list ^^"

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o


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