Subject: RE: [lojban] za'e "postnex"

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 03:41:53 -0000

Martin Bays:
> Is there a nice way to quantify over variables "in afterthought"?
> 
> It's the kind of thing you see in (informal) mathematics all the time -
> it's often natural to assume your variables are arbitrary when you write
> the main formula, and only afterwards think to put in the "for all x". So
> you might have, say "n[sub]i > 0 (all i in N)" 
> 
> So is there an elegant way to translate this kind of thing into lojban?

Not in Standard Lojban. But one has been proposed for Academic Lojban:

http://www.lojban.org/wiki/index.php/Experimental%20anaphorics

Your example would be:

koi'a xi i bu zmadu li no zo'au ro da poi [i in N]

It's not a pure afterthought system, in the sense that it doesn't avoid
all need to plan ahead, but even if a pure afterthought system were
possible it would be so complicated that it would be harder to use
than forethought (i.e. it would be easier to plan ahead than to
not plan ahead & have to go into contortions to undo the effects
of the failure to plan ahead).

--And.