Subject: tautologies

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 17:08:25

la pycyn cusku di'e

>But {xukau
>brode} is an indirect question, so not even close to a tautology marker. I
>know that ther has been a lot of fiddling with {kau}, but none of the moves
>would seem to justify this particular step. Expatiate.

I don't remember what you thought of:

mi ta te vecnu ije makau ta jdima
I buy it, whatever be its price.

Which naturally leads to:

mi ta te vecnu ije xukau ta kargu
I buy it, whetherever it be expensive.

You might want to add some kind of causality connector instead
of a simple {ije}, but the second sentence is still a tautology.

In English you can say tautological things like "it costs whatever
it costs", which one could lojbanize as "ta se jdima makau", but
it is hard to find a tautology operator to do a complete
proposition. We can try to fake it as in: "either it is raining
or it is not", but then Stephen Belknap may want to say that
sometimes it is neither quite raining nor quite not raining,
so that the proposed tautology is turned into a claim that
there is no third possibility (and thus is no longer a tautology).
{xukau carvi} does not admit that, because it covers whatever
intermediate answers {xu carvi} may have.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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