Subject: RE: [lojban] Re: Well I guess you do learn something new every day...

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 18:00:23 -0400

At 02:11 AM 8/10/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>Lojbab:
>I wouldn't expect spoken formal predicate logic to be verbose. And I would
>further expect an elaborated spoken formal predicate logic to include
>abbreviating shortcuts that complicate the austerely simple grammar of
>pred.log. but make sentences shorter.

Neither JCB nor LLG ever tried to tackle to problem from that 
standpoint. So whatever one means by the claim that Lojban is "logical", 
we were not trying to find a short sentence version of predicate logic.

> > A self-referential definition is not a definition.
>
>Yes it is. Deixis, for example, is all self-referentially defined.

And we have specific and distinct words to indicate deixis.

>There is nothing meaningless about defining the semantics of nei/no'a
>in terms of its syntactic configuration.
>
> > > > And what does "nei" convey that co'e would not?
> > >
> > >The meaning of nei is precide
> >
> > Yeah? As you define it, it means "precisely" nothing, since it is an
> > anaphora for itself.
>
>NO, it's an anaphor to the bridi it occurs in. Since nei is not the
>bridi it occurs in, nei is not an anaphor for itself.
>
>It's incredible that you are making such objections about this. If
>I give you a sentence like "ko'a djuno le du'u ko'a broda le nei",
>and I ask you "Which bridi does {nei} occur in, you have no
>trouble answering "lu ko'e broda le nei li'u". Likewise, if I
>ask you which bridi contains this, again you, despite your protestations
>to the contrary, can identify it as lu ko'a djuno le du'u ko'a broda le
>nei li'u. And if I ask you to identify, say, the x1 sumti of that
>bridi, then, again, you can identify it as lu ko'a li'u.

Yes, but the example sentence we were dealing with was
>Pragmatically, in a bare "mi djuno ledu'u nei" I would not consider the nei
>to be self representing, so the "current bridi" has to be "djuno", and no'a
>refers outward from djuno, as ra refers backwards from whatever ri is
>pragmatically determined to mean.

and the question I address there is whether "nei" in "le du'u nei" 
represents itself or the bridi which djuno is the selbri of. The prior 
example I was responding to was an instance of le du'u no'a. If nei 
represents djuno, then no'a would have to go out one level from the 
referent of nei.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org