Subject: Re: [lojban] translation challenge: "If today is Monday..."

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 17:40:17

la xod cusku di'e

> > 1. If today is Monday, then tomorrow is Tuesday.
>
>Well, I'm curious to see what you find wrong with ganai, gi.
>
>ganai le pavdei cu cabdei gi le reldei cu bavlamdei

That one is true every day, but you left out half of the
challenge: {ganai le pavdei cu cabdei gi le cibdei cu bavlamdei}
is false on Mondays but true the rest of the week. You want
the fact that it is false on Mondays to make the statement
permanently false.

[Aside: Any reason to invert subject and predicate? Why not
{le cabdei cu pavdei}?]

The only way to solve it is to make explicit the universal
quantification that "if" hides in English. You can quantify
over all possible worlds (ro mu'ei), then, since there will
always be one in which today is Monday, that will be enough to
make the second sentence always false. (You have to limit
possible worlds to those in which Tuesdays always follow
Mondays in order for the first one to be true.) Or you can
do as John did and quantify over all days. I think this is
what goes on in English, "today" really stands for "each day",
in the same way that "you" stands for "each person" in generic
statements like "if you put your hands on the fire, you burn
yourself". That really means "for every person x, if x puts
x's hands on the fire, x burns x-self".

For every "today" x, if x is Monday, then "the tomorrow" of x
is Tuesday. TRUE

For every "today" x, if x is Monday, then "the tomorrow" of x
is Wednesday. FALSE

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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