Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: interactions between tenses, other tenses, and NA

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 18:42:35 EDT

In a message dated 9/27/2002 3:39:31 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> If I understand correctly, "the usual language of formal
> logic" would have something like ~Fab
> 
> This can be described as:
> 
> 1- Negation in front of the predicate
> 2- Negation in front of the whole expression
> 
> Lojban does: a~Fb, so as far as negation goes, it either follows 
> the usual language of formal logic (by 1) or it does not follow the
> usual language of formal logic (by 2).
>>
Taxicab again. Now I see your point: the Lojban is neither out in front 
marking out in front nor inside marking inside, so what is logical about it? 
Answer -- historical and JCB-related (and we know what that means): English 
represents ~Fab by a~Fb, even when a is a quantified expression (though not 
always), so the way that natural langauges represent ~Fab is a~Fb (this is 
still pretty much true for SAE, with variants -- less true for French, if I 
remember rightly; I don't remember the distribution for Spanish cases; pretty 
true for German), so Loglan (hence, Lojban) should represent ~Fab (even if a 
is quantified, i.e., ~ QxFxb) as a~Fb. Yeah, I know, but that is sorta how 
it went and we are stuck with it (although I don't find it that hard to deal 
with, since it is so like (my) English).