Subject: Re: [lojban] Bald men

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 19:51:34 -0500

At 03:15 PM 10/31/01 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>James F. Carter scripsit:
> > As pc points out, English speakers could interpret the sentence two ways:
> > "each and every man doesn't have hair", or "it's not true that every man
> > has hair". A logician would pick the first one, Lojban is a logical
> > language, and the Lojban text is constructed accordingly.
>
>This is about how logicians construe English, not what "ro nanmu na se kerfa"
>means.

That is also how lojbab construes the English, and NO ONE would call lojbab 
a "logician" %^)

I never saw the other interpretation of "all X's don't Y" until I got on 
the Internet. I would not be surprised to find that this is a dialect 
difference, such that people like myself and Carter who grew up in CA 
understand the "logical" version. (I learned that one says the other as 
"Not all men have hair.") But then, Nora says that she learned it the same 
way as me, and she grew up in Philadelphia, so perhaps it is a change in 
the language with the generations.

I always do a double take when I read the non-universal "all X's don't Y".

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org