Subject: RE: [lojban] tu'o usage

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 04:53:16 +0100

pc:
> [email-masked] writes:
> <<
> 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?

As a linguist, at University College London. I was only ever taught
by linguists (counting formal semanticists as such), never by out and
out logicians.

> Even
> mathematicians and linguists pretty much get this right.

The the confusion may be about what "this" is.

> 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").

I mean that {ro broda cu brode} and {ro da poi broda cu brode}
DON'T ENTAIL {da broda}. (Caps for emphasis, not shouting.)
That is, they are equivalent to {ro da ga na broda gi brode}.

In saying that, I'm just describing my habits of interpretation.

> 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),

Right. As I understand it, this is your position, legitimately backed
up by an Argument from Authority, which I'm not confident I'm capable
of understanding, while Jorge takes the contrary view.

I am saying that I hope Jorge is right, so as to spare me having to
unlearn my habits. Of course, if I'm thereby committing some horrible
logical fallacy I would want to recant, but I don't (yet) see why
{ro broda cu brode} and {ro da poi broda cu brode} can't be strictly
equivalent to {ro da ga na broda gi brode}.

> 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.

My brand of English has "all" and "every" as nonimporting, and
"each" as importing, but "each" quantifies over a definite class
(i.e. it means "each of the"), so the importingness is probably
an artefact of the definiteness.

> <<
> 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).

I take it that the 'operations' are 'gone through' from inside to
outside, i.e. mainly right to left in a Lojban-style syntax? That is,
if X has scope over Y, then Y is processed before X? In that case,
yes.

But it's in fact not easy to see how to turn it into a concrete
proposal. If you have the logical formula:

P and ASSERTED: Q

how should that be expressed grammatically so that it comes out
like

Q PRESUPPOSED: and P

?

--And.