Subject: Re: thoughts on numerical language

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 04:19:35 -0000

--- In lojban@y..., Pierre Abbat <phma@o...> wrote:
> On Monday 03 December 2001 19:01, Craig wrote:
> > One of the first things I did to make Lojban feel less alien was 
think of
> > English as having a lot of one and two place selbri (verbs). All 
other
> > places are added modally. Lojban just happens to have some 
selbri with more
> > places, but it really doesn't need to. It just makes it more 
succinct -
> > though with your not worrying about pronounceability that can 
easily come
> > from other places.
> 
> I think that selbri fi >=3mei are needed. Any more can be 
expressed with 
> combinations of three-place selbri, but there must be some with at 
least 
> three. 3-satisfiability is equivalent to unlimited-terbri 
satisfiability, but 
> 2-satisfiability is not.
> phma

There are some true ternary operators, like perhaps definite 
integrals. There's probably some true quaternary operators as well, 
so where do you stop? Binary just happens to be a useful place to 
stop. You could even have one or zero places, but this would turn 
out to be very wordy in a spoken language. Might be worth 
investigating in a numerical language though.