From lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx Sun Oct 31 07:40:22 1999 X-Digest-Num: 271 Message-ID: <44114.271.1502.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Sun, 31 Oct 1999 10:40:22 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Over the past several days I have been pondering this issue. Here's my >latest impression. > >"Everybody loves somebody" does not imply that "somebody is loved by >everybody", because in the former case, "somebody" may refer to a >different somebody for each in the "everybody", while in the latter case >it refers for a single given individual. > >Why? Because in English, the subject is stated first, and when enumeration >is given to a subject it is taken to be absolute, whereas when it is given >to the object, it is relative to the subject. > >This is because English sentences tend to be statements about subjects. > >The Lojban bridi is a statement made "from infinity", a clear description >of fact from a 3rd party perspective. All Lojban utterances are this way, >except ones with prenexes containing terms of different "scope"! Those are >the only bridi that violate that fact that "da broda de" implies "de se >broda da". > >This is an affront to my Lojbanic intuition and aesthetic. These sentences >follow English subject/object biases, right down to their word ordering. Since the ordering rule of prenexes means that terms always have different scopes (the first one includes the second in its scope), your "except one with prenexes ..." means "except everything". If there are sumti, there is a prenex, though it may be ellipsized. The bias in Lojban is NOT "English subject/object" - it is simple left to right bias, because that is the order in which we read. (It also happens to be the bias of logical notation, which I believe was not particularly an English invention, but pc could fill us in on this). The bias you describe is not subject/object for English either, I believe, because if you manage to rearrange the sentence to be non-subject-initial, it still logically groups from the left: To somewhere, via some route, goes everyone. (stolen from a Book chapter title) vs Everyone goes somewhere via some route. In both of these sentences, "everyone" is the subject, but in the first, "everyone" does not have scope precedence. That you find ordered scope an affront is something I can understand; I felt the same way, having mastered the symmetry of SE conversion, when scope reared its ugly head and spoiled that symmetry. But the bottom line question is what you would have roda prami de and de se prami roda mean. You have to choose meanings for both of these sentences, and they can either mean the same thing or two different things. The status quo using logical scope is that they mean different things. If you decide based on symmetry that they must mean the same thing, then you still have a scope issue in deciding whether x1 or x2 takes precedence. If you decide that ordering is based on place number, both mean "Everybody loves somebody". Let us hypothetically accept this. Now what about "de selprami roda". By turning the tanru into a lujvo, the se conversion becomes implicit and the place numbers x1 x2 are no longer as if it were a conversion. (You can try to keep numbering them in the order of "prami", but this just makes confusion when you make even larger lujvo especially those with more than one gismu being converted.) Sooner or later something breaks. Alas. Symmetry fails. I'm not sure where you want to go with your set mappings, but even if you can do that sort of thing in Lojban and have it make sense, you have to deal with the above breakdown of symmetry. lojbab ---- lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ " Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.