Subject: Re: [lojban] Intro and questions

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 May 2000 04:07:40 -0400

At 11:17 PM 05/05/2000 -0500, Taral wrote:
>On Fri, 5 May 2000 [email-masked] wrote:
>
> > << .i la'e zoi gy. counterfactuals .gy mo
> > (What are counterfactuals?)>>
> > Sentences that contain references to situations known or believed not to
> > obtain, typically, in English, "if , then" with subjunctives: "If I were
> > inventing English, I would leave the damned things out" They have various
> > functions that get glopped together in English.
>
>.i mi na jimpe (I don't understand.)

The example was probably more confusing than it needed to be, in the 
interest of humor.

Take the classic saying "If wishes were horses, then beggars would 
ride". Now we know that wishes are NOT horses, so the "if" clause of this 
conditional is always false. As a conditional then, it is rather 
meaningless. Why would we make a condition where the antecedent cannot be 
true? In this case, to stretch a metaphor about beggars.

Another example: "If I were President (of the US), then I'd ...". Well I 
am not President, so the antecedent is again false. But in this case it is 
a theoretically possible situation, and if I were running for President 
(there's another), then you might take the conditional as expressing a 
campaign promise. Alternatively, if I were a media columnist saying that, 
I might be making a serious criticism of some policy decision.

In all these cases, the antecedent is counter to fact, hence 
"counterfactual". We mark counterfactuals with one of the rare surviving 
places that English uses a subjunctive ("If I were President", vs. "When I 
*was* President").

Because there are so many diverse uses for the counterfactual in English, 
there is no simple translation into Lojban. Most common is to use 
discursive (UI) "da'i" which being the opposite of "da'inai" ("in fact") 
marks a supposition which is indeed NOT fact. But that may not be best for 
all scenarios. Read back discussions on Lojban List looking for the word 
"counterfactual" to find the issues.

lojbab
----
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)