Subject: Re: [lojban] Centripetal-centrifugal, little-endian--big-endian, subsets-contents, etc.

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 06:48:30 -0400

At 09:39 PM 05/10/2000 +0000, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> > I am inclined to think that the fact that human languages fairly regularly
> > offer centrifugal constructions is itself evidence that the 
> centripetal-only
> > thought pattern is not in fact the rule.
>
>The European languages are a tiny minority on the planet, but they have,
>not through language design merits, marginalised most of the others.

Human languages are not designed, and are absolutely equal in terms of 
"design merits".

> > And, of course, none of this decides the structure of dates, since it is
> > equally possible (and, to me, more natural) to take the year as the 
> name of a
> > set and a month as specifying a subset within that set and the day as
> > specifying a unit subset within that and thus get dmy again but as a
> > centripetal structure.
>
>You mean something like
>
> the year 2001 .
> which year 20001 ?
> the year 2001 of the 5th month .
> of which month 5 ?
> the year 2001 of the 5th month of the 20th day .

No. You are using English language to talk about set membership, and that 
requires the subset first, hence as he said dmy results.

>but I fail to assign this any meaning.

Because you tried to express English as ymd, and it doesn't work.

lojbab
----
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
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