Subject: Re: [lojban] Retraction, Part 1

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:41:54 -0700 (PDT)

cu'u la xorxes

>>Lesson 14 currently says in an exercise that the 'chicken' Zhang is
>>building out of pretzels should not be described as {lo jipci}, but {le
>>jipci}. Should this now be eliminated?

>At least it should be modified, because the alternative to {lo jipci}
>is {lo jipci tarmi} not {le jipci}. There's no reason why the pretzel
>nature of the object would require a definite instead of an indefinite
>reference.

xorxes, you know better than that: {le} is not definite, it's
non-veridical, and the case of {le ninmu} that turns out to be {lo nanmu}
is definitional to it. Definiteness is neither here nor there.

You can contend that {le} should be definite, not non-veridical. I would
go further, and say that since Bertrand Russell came up with the iota
quantifier yay back when, using a non-veridical to model definiteness is
embarrassing. But that's set in stone for Lojban.

>And if you're brave enough you might want to explain why it
>should be {lo tarmi be lo'e jipci} and not {lo tarmi be lo jipci}.

I've only mentioned {lo'e} once glancingly in the lessons, so I'm
disinclined to. Hate to say this, since it's my fault, but they're
overloaded as is.

-- 
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
[email-masked] -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias