Subject: RE: [lojban] if

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 22:15:18 -0000

[replying to list, because I can't see why this wd be sent as
private reply]

> From: Rob Speer [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: 03 December 2001 02:09
>
> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 07:38:48PM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > * mu'ei always works (tho can't do counterfactuality); it also has the
> > advantage of being in ROI, the most convenient selmaho for the job.
>
> Wait a sec. Perhaps you mean something different by "counterfactuality",
> because I believe that {mu'ei} is in fact the only thing (besides
> {da'i}) which can express a counterfactual statement. It describes
> things which do not necessarily happen in this universe but could or
> would have happened in others.

Oh right. Then yes, you were right; _mu'ei_ does what you say it does.
I'm not sure about _da'i_, though; I'd have to see the examples. By
'counterfactuality' I meant 'counter to fact' -- something that didn't
happen in this universe. "I wish that **you were here**", "**Had you been
here**, I would...".

> Perhaps what you're saying is that you can't use {mu'ei} to explicitly
> say that it didn't happen in this universe, and that is why in Greg's
> example I used {mu'ei le na'eca'a nu}.

Ah, right you are. Good thinking. "na'e ca'a nu" isn't quite right,
because it's not guaranteed to nonetheless denote a ka'e nu. What you
want is "nu'o" = ka'e but not ca'a. One snag, though, is that I had
envisaged mu'ei as being tcita for a du'u sumti rather than a nu
sumti, in which case your clever idea wouldn't work. And changing it
from du'u to nu seems to me to raise various logical problems that
I won't go into here.

> I can see how the word "counterfactual" might apply to either meaning.
> Which just goes to show we need Lojban words for this. {datmu'efau}?

OK. I'd have used "irrealis" for the meaning you were using.

--And.