Subject: rono

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 14:21:19 +1100

Folks, I haven't been following, and am unlikely to follow the debate 
on importing and {ro}. Am I right in saying that this boils down to 
whether {ro} entails {su'o}, and therefore {rono broda} should be 
statable or not?

If so, then I vote for whatever allows {rono}. Because {rono} is 
cool, and matches what I've internalised. I would see "All 20th Dalai 
Lamas play foosball" to be either vacuously true or (at most) 
metalinguistically false, but not literally false. Aplying the Grice 
Salvator [see wiki], I am quite happy for ro => su'opa to be an 
implicature.

The point of Lojban as far as I can tell is primarily that it be 
formal, not that it be anchored to the prevalent logical paradigm. If 
it is possible for Lojban to be internally consistent and allow {ro} 
to apply to the empty universe, then the fact that prevalent logics 
don't allow that is not decisive to me. It is enough to me that a 
possible logic does allow it. It would be nice if Lojban was Standard 
Logical rather than Natlang, but in this case the Third is not 
excluded: if you tell me that maths uses {ro} = {rono}, then I say 
that's legitimation enough.

If ro allows rono and that ro destroys logic, we get the logical ro 
back with rosu'o. This might make a hash of any one-to-one mapping 
between existential and universal quantification, but I regard it as 
just a minor nuisance.

Btw, in case anyone was interested, I do not believe the issues 
currently being discussed here are to be resolved in the dictionary. 
The discussion of {lo'e} that has just petered out on jboske is, but 
the scoping and entailments of {ro}, IMO, are not. That's not 
lexical; that's grammar and logic.
-- 
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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies [email-masked] *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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