Subject: Re: [lojban] Predicate logic and childhood.

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 15:57:06 -0400

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