Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: possible worlds

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 12:04:43 EDT

In a message dated 6/20/2001 9:40:10 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 09:03:44PM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> > In a message dated 6/20/2001 6:25:42 PM Central Daylight Time, 
> > [email-masked] writes:
> > 
> > 
> > > .i le da'i logji cmavo poi roroi mapti zoi <if, then> cu du lo da'i 
> logji
> > > cmavo poi da'inai na zasti
> > > 
> > Something ain't quite right here -- and in a previous post from the same 
> > source. I guess that -- whether discursive or "attitudinal" -- {da'i} 
> can go 
> > anywhere in a sentence, but it seems pretty clear that in at least some 
> > places here it is adjectival to {logji cmavo}, meaning either "supposed" 
> or 
> > "{da'i}-like"
> 
> Why would it be adjectival? If I were talking about the word {da'i} itself, 
> I
> would have said something involving {zo da'i}. Here I was using it for its
> newfound purpose of describing possible worlds.
> 
> What I was using it for was "the supposed logical connective which always
> applies to <if, then>".
> 
> Without the {da'i}, I would be talking about "the logical connective which
> always applies to <if, then>". However, no such connective exists, and that
> sentence would logically fall apart because of that. So I used {da'i} to
> refer to this object in a possible world where such a thing would exist (and
> I pity the inhabitants of that world and the broken version of Lojban 
> they're
> stuck with).
> 

The point is well taken, as I said, but will this way of saying it really 
work? Wherever {da'i} occurs, it presumably works to throw the whole 
sentence into the suppositive mood (I'm using the official rules, of 
course). Whether the repeated {da'i} throws it into a second-order 
supposition or not, I can't say, nor can I work out the rhetorical effect of 
putting the {da'i} after {le}. At a guess the latter focuses the goal of the 
supposition on the sumti which {le} begins, which is, I think, your goal, 
more or less.
So this seems to say "Suppose that there is a logical connective which always 
matches 'if then' ..." or, more literally but clearly not what you want, 
"Suppose that the logical connective which always matches 'if then' is a 
logical connective that does not in fact exist" Now all of this does make 
for a problem, since it involves a referring phrase which you want to say 
does not refer. And yet it does refer (in fact, to {ganai...gi...}); what it 
does not do is match "if..., then..."
Does {le a'o mi se prami} mean "the beloved I hope for"?