From jcowan@reutershealth.com Fri Mar 01 12:25:31 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: unknown); 1 Mar 2002 20:25:31 -0000 Received: (qmail 19071 invoked from network); 1 Mar 2002 20:25:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.167) by m4.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 1 Mar 2002 20:25:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta1.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 1 Mar 2002 20:25:29 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[10.65.117.21]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA17610; Fri, 1 Mar 2002 15:25:40 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3C7FE395.9060505@reutershealth.com> Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 15:24:53 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jorge Llambias Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautologies References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=8122456 X-Yahoo-Profile: john_w_cowan Jorge Llambias wrote: > We have {la djan}, {abu} and {li pa} to refer to John, Alice, > and the number one, i.e. that's how we use the name "John", > the pronoun "A" and the numeral "1". > > We also have {zo djan}, {me'o abu} and {me'o pa} to refer > to the name "John", the letter "A" and the numeral "1", > to mention them, not use them. We [in the U.S., anyway] mention "our large nuclear arsenal" so we don't have to use it. --Douglas Hofstadter > The symmetry is not complete only because {abu} does not > require an article to be used. What you say is correct, though you don't point out the contrast between {me'o pa}, the numeral "1" vs. {zo pa}, the word "pa"; likewise, between {me'o ny.}, the letter "n" vs. {zo ny.}, the word "ny." > {li abu} is another use > for the letter "a", this time not as a pronoun but as > the value of a variable, although I'm not very clear > what type of variable this is supposed to be and how > it is different from a pronoun. It is not different at the level of predicate logic. By convention, its referent is taken to be a mathematical object. It is also syntactically different: "ko'a le mlatu" is two sumti, even if the current referent of "ko'a" is a number, whereas "ny. le mlatu" is a single sumti meaning "N of the cats I have in mind". >>But won't {ny y'ybu} >>turn into some weird combination of a variable and character? No (forgot to say this before). ".y'y.bu" is on the same footing as "ny.", and combines with it to make a multi-letteral variable/pronoun. -- John Cowan http://www.reutershealth.com I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_