Subject: Re: [lojban] tu'o usage

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 20:26:51 EDT

In a message dated 9/23/2002 5:31:58 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> My sense
> is that in the one case where no might plausibly be the cardinality,
> viz after lo'i, one generally wants to allow for the possibility of
> no.
> 
> What other solutions are there?
>>
Well, we have something for {ro-}, non-importing {ro}: {ro ni'u}, I think.

<<
FWIW, my schooling is such that I automatically take ro broda and
ro da poi broda to NOT entail da broda. So if for no other reason
than sheer habit, I prefer nonimporting ro.
Interesting. What were you schooled as and where? Even mathematicians and 
linguists pretty much get this right. But, since what you say is sorta mixed 
categories, I suppose you might have gotten that all from someone confused by 
a semieducation in the area. I suppose you mean {ro broda cu brode} and {ro 
da poi broda cu brode} entail {da broda} (or you mean "implicate" rather than 
"entail"). It is quite true that for many people much of the time "All broda 
are brode" does not entail "There are broda," but by the same token, {ro 
broda cu brode} or {ro da poi broda cu brode} are not translations of that 
sentence (in that sense), rather {ro da zo'u ganai da broda gi da brode} is, 
just like we learned in Logic 01. {ro broda cu brode} etc. translate what is 
in my dialect "Every broda is a brode" or "Each broda is a brode." Some 
native speakers of English claim that their dialect does not make this 
distinction, but, curiously, they then divide into two groups over which of 
the two possibilities there uniform universal is -- with most going for the 
non-importing admittedly.

<<
But I go along with the general desire to minimize presupposition
(though Lionel's suggestion of an explicit marker of presupposition
might be nice, though I'll leave it to someone else to propose it,
since I'm weary of incurring the scorn of Jay and Jordan).
The trick seems to be a metaconjuction that works at one level like an 
ordinary conjunction but at another level is not attached until all the other 
operations have been gone through (see some of the stuff about interdefining 
the various types of quantifiers earlier this year).