From rob@twcny.rr.com Tue May 01 17:03:38 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: rob@twcny.rr.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_2); 2 May 2001 00:03:38 -0000 Received: (qmail 62459 invoked from network); 1 May 2001 19:59:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 1 May 2001 19:59:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mailout4-0.nyroc.rr.com) (24.92.226.120) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 May 2001 19:59:43 -0000 Received: from mail1.twcny.rr.com (mail1-1 [24.92.226.139]) by mailout4-0.nyroc.rr.com (8.11.2/RoadRunner 1.03) with ESMTP id f41JvdA18393 for ; Tue, 1 May 2001 15:57:39 -0400 (EDT) Received: from riff ([24.95.175.122]) by mail1.twcny.rr.com (Post.Office MTA v3.5.3 release 223 ID# 0-59787U250000L250000S0V35) with ESMTP id com for ; Tue, 1 May 2001 15:57:38 -0400 Received: from rob by riff with local (Exim 3.22 #1 (Debian)) id 14ugGg-0000BI-00 for ; Tue, 01 May 2001 15:57:06 -0400 Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 15:57:06 -0400 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Predicate logic and childhood. Message-ID: <20010501155706.A603@twcny.rr.com> Reply-To: rob@twcny.rr.com References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.17i In-Reply-To: ; from arosta@uclan.ac.uk on Tue, May 01, 2001 at 03:49:09PM +0100 X-Is-It-Not-Nifty: www.sluggy.com From: Rob Speer On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 03:49:09PM +0100, And Rosta wrote: > Robin Lee Powell: > #No-one has yet managed to tell me what possible use, in actual > #communication, things like o and anai have. > > I forget what "anai" is, but assuming it reverses the truth table > for "a", would it mean "neither X nor Y"? "Neither X nor Y" is na.enai. anai is "X or not Y", or alternatively, "Y implies X". > And "I drink milk only in coffee and coffee only with milk" could > involve "milk o coffee". That is true. As I pointed out, the sumti connectives are relatively easy to find uses for. > Anyway, it's no longer appropriate to hold up one's hands in horror > at this or that feature of Lojban and hope that something will be > done about it. If great swathes of Lojban are communicatively > useless, then that's just how things are. But I want to know why the sentence connectives should be made communicatively useless. They convey a perfectly meaningful idea. In the case of the English sentences we are translating, you can get the cause-and-effect meaning of it using the structure xorxes prefers, but you can also convey the logical meaning. I would say that neither translation would be exactly equal to the English sentence, but that both should be acceptable. Additionally, for sentences which are not translated but created entirely in Lojban, I see no reason why logic cannot be the basis of the sentence. The problem with {ko} is only a tangent. I believe {do bazi} would have the same truth value, so perhaps use that instead. People seem to be implying that as soon as there is cause and effect involved, you are not allowed to use logical connectives. Not that you can choose not to use them in favor of a cause-and-effect statement, but that you just can't use them. I have yet to see an answer to why there should not be a choice of sentence structure. -- Rob Speer