From rob@twcny.rr.com Wed May 02 16:14:00 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: rob@twcny.rr.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_2); 2 May 2001 23:13:50 -0000 Received: (qmail 50205 invoked from network); 2 May 2001 21:15:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 2 May 2001 21:15:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mailout4-0.nyroc.rr.com) (24.92.226.120) by mta3 with SMTP; 2 May 2001 21:15:15 -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 f42LDEA08568 for ; Wed, 2 May 2001 17:13:14 -0400 (EDT) Received: from riff ([24.95.175.101]) by mail1.twcny.rr.com (Post.Office MTA v3.5.3 release 223 ID# 0-59787U250000L250000S0V35) with ESMTP id com for ; Wed, 2 May 2001 17:13:13 -0400 Received: from rob by riff with local (Exim 3.22 #1 (Debian)) id 14v3vN-0000mI-00 for ; Wed, 02 May 2001 17:12:41 -0400 Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:12:41 -0400 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Predicate logic and childhood. Message-ID: <20010502171241.A2747@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 Wed, May 02, 2001 at 04:21:22PM +0100 X-Is-It-Not-Nifty: www.sluggy.com From: Rob Speer On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 04:21:22PM +0100, And Rosta wrote: > #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. > > I have lost the thread, I'm afraid, and can't reconstruct what are the issues > under debate. Would you be willing to take the trouble to recapitulate? The sentence that started all of this is "If you clean your room, I'll let you go to the park." I suggested {ko (do bazi) nicygau ledo kumfa .ijo mi curmi lenu do klama le panka}. xorxes thinks that this sentence means something different than "If you clean your room, I'll let you go to the park" and should not be used to translate it, instead suggesting either using the x3 of curmi (spawning a side-debate about what the x3 of curmi really means) or some sort of "conditional" which expresses it in terms of cause and effect. (I have no idea how this would be formed in Lojban, and I don't believe an example has been provided, though it might be 'rinka' with a 'nu' on both sides.) lojbab posted a confusing message where he suggested that logical connectives would be used for things like "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride", but it seems that, for one thing, that wouldn't work at all, and also that seems to be another issue which I don't think was satisfactorily resolved. I believe that both .ijo and the conditional would give a good enough approximation of the English meaning of the sentence. English is fuzzy enough that we don't need to argue about how to translate the most detailed implications of a sentence. Incidentally, I'd like to see how this "conditional" would be constructed. I'd rather not hunt through the archives of the list. -- Rob Speer