Re: [lojban] Predicate logic and childhood.
Rob Speer
> However, for maximum clarity it would perhaps be best to use
>
> C .ijo P
>
> so that if the child does not clean eir room, and the parent allows the
> child to go to the park, the parent has lied again. Which the parent
> will probably reluctant to do, so this helps constrain the parent to not
> change eir mind.
Thank you. I wish I could have said it so concisely.
It would seem that the only problem with my version of the sentence was 'ko',
which seems to apply to both sides of a logical connective. (I still think this
should not be the case.) Your C doesn't involve 'ko', and now I see that it
wasn't necessary in the first place, so it works.
--
Rob Speer
Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)
>On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 05:36:31PM -0400, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> > At 02:00 PM 04/30/2001 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > >On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 03:53:18PM -0400, Rob Speer wrote:
> > > > Okay, I should have looked a little harder. Your C does have a 'ko'
> in it.
> > >
> > >Correct. Note that either ko binding stops at the .ijo, or jbofi'e has
> > >a bug in it.
> >
> > I believe that variable binding must continue across an .ijo boundary
> > because such a sentence pair can in theory be re-expressed as a single
> > sentence having identical meaning (subject to some special rules for
> > negation and the like), using gi'o or using go...gi, and the
> > presumption in either case would be that the ko has scope over the
> > entire compound bridi.
>
>Why?
Because that is what the refgrammar says?
(pg 403-405 - the section title seems to imply it about negation, but the
statements therein are not restricted to negations, but merely say that
negation doesn't affect their applicability. See especially 10.2, which is
not a negation and the statement following it, and then the example with a
prenex in 10.6).
If two logically-connected sentences are equivalent to a single sentence,
then the logical scope has to always continue beyond the connection. It is
possible, though not necessarily easy, to express shorter scope.
>Once again, either your wrong or jbofi'e has a bug:
>
>go ko viska gi cusku
>(0[go {ko viska} gi cusku])0
I don't know anything about jbofi'e or how it would indicate scope. The
standard parser would not show the continuation of scope either. That is
because the parser indicates grammatical structure/scope; logical scope is
a semantics question.
>And I see no indication of such scoping in the grammar, but that proves
>very little.
>
>Note that, IMO, you're moving the definitions in the wrong direction.
>IIRC, go...gi is _defined_ as a shortform for a two sentence connective.
Forethought connectives are defined in the section following afterthought
connectives, but there is no relationship between the two discussed at that
point - they are merely alternate ways of expressing connection (the text
seems to get distracted on why *English* chooses one or the other, but
doesn't at that point say that they are equivalent). It is later, in the
logic chapter after discussion of prenexes that the two are said to be
equivalent and I see nothing there that suggests one is a short form of the
other.
GIhEKs on the other hand seem to be described as a short form when the left
side of the selbri is shared in common.
Now, there is one tidbit suggesting the opposite, but it is weak and
indirect. On 468, in the discussion of topic/comment, it says that you
need to use tu'e/tu'u to get a topic in the prenex to extend over more than
one sentence. If one were therefore to interpret "ko" as a "topic" when
exported to the prenex rather than as a "variable", then it would not
extend across the sentence boundary without tu'e grouping.
But this remains a semantic question, with two semantic principles
competing, in this case a logical one (of scope) vs. a linguistic one of
topic/comment. Like the story-time tense convention, one has to pay
attention to the context and realize that there are times when usage will
not fit the convention.
> > However, missing the context that led to the current example, one
> > should not being using a logical connective to express this room/park
> > conditional, because there is time-order or causality involved. The
> > room being cleaned may be necessary, sufficient, preceding, or
> > causally determining whether the child goes to the park; the two
> > clauses do not in fact have independent truth values as is necessary
> > to use logical connectives.
>
>I disagree, because whether the child cleans eir room and whether the
>parent gives permission to go to the park are independent by default,
>but assuming you're right.
>
>Two questions, then:
>
>1. What's the point of allowing things like .ijobabo?
Because it is hard to prohibit them?
It is a short way of expressing two things at once - that the two sentences
are independent and equivalent, and that the event of the second sentence
takes place after the first.
But I have never seen babo used other than with .ije so I can't necessarily
come up with a reason why someone would use it with .ijo.
Note that the point of the "bo" is to make sure that the "ba" does not
attach to any sumti following the connective but instead remains part of
the connective. There is another usage of bo, of course: to force tighter
binding of connectives in contrast to the normal left-grouping, but that
takes a series of three or more connected sentences before it comes into
play, and we have ijobake for the same function with different grouping.
>2. What is the use of conditionals other than .e?
Well, "a" expressing alternation (and anai for conditional) has a pretty
clear usage, and onai for exclusive-or does as well. But the use of
logical connectives in general is based on the assumption, probably false,
that language is attempting to express logical truth. By insisting that
the language connectives follow the rules of logic strictly, people will
either start thinking in a manner that reflects those rules or they will
avoid the use of connectives (or they will break the rules). This is a key
design feature for the original purpose of the language as a test of
Sapir-Whorf, though I personally think that the formal logical aspects of
Lojban don't come into play enough that it will matter much.
I haven't done any examination of the corpus to see how people have used
the other connectives, and whether they have done so correctly and
consistently. There has been usage of jo and ju, but not much. We have
concocted examples where they can be used generally in logical argument
rather than in assertions about reality, but it isn't clear whether they
will ever be used in the latter.
lojbab
--
lojbab loj...@lojban.org
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
Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)
>On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 03:53:18PM -0400, Rob Speer wrote:
> > Okay, I should have looked a little harder. Your C does have a 'ko' in it.
>
>Correct. Note that either ko binding stops at the .ijo, or jbofi'e has
>a bug in it.
I believe that variable binding must continue across an .ijo boundary
because such a sentence pair can in theory be re-expressed as a single
sentence having identical meaning (subject to some special rules for
negation and the like), using gi'o or using go...gi, and the presumption in
either case would be that the ko has scope over the entire compound bridi.
However, missing the context that led to the current example, one should
not being using a logical connective to express this room/park conditional,
because there is time-order or causality involved. The room being cleaned
may be necessary, sufficient, preceding, or causally determining whether
the child goes to the park; the two clauses do not in fact have independent
truth values as is necessary to use logical connectives.
lojbab
Rob Speer
this raises these questions:
- Would the sentence still work if it had 'do' instead of 'ko'?
- If there is a 'ko' in C, is it asking the child to make C true or to make
.ijo true?
--
Rob Speer
Robin Lee Powell
Correct. Note that either ko binding stops at the .ijo, or jbofi'e has
a bug in it.
> So this raises these questions:
>
> - Would the sentence still work if it had 'do' instead of 'ko'?
Not IMO, because then C becomes:
You have now/are now cleaned/cleaning your room.
It seems unlikely that the parent would need an enticement for something
that has already occured.
> - If there is a 'ko' in C, is it asking the child to make C true or to make
> .ijo true?
C.
I have _no_ idea where people are getting this idea that ko carries
across a logical connective between sentences, but the grammar doesn't
seem to bear this out.
-Robin
--
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/
Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)
>On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 06:44:27PM -0400, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> > At 02:48 PM 04/30/2001 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > >2. What is the use of conditionals other than .e?
> >
> > Well, "a" expressing alternation (and anai for conditional) has a pretty
> > clear usage, and onai for exclusive-or does as well.
>
>discussion.
It has a clear meaning and usage, but it just happens that this clear
meaning and usage is NOT that of the colloquial language "conditional",
which is usually a time or causal connection. There are times when it is
the right thing to use, and this again is going to be mostly about logical
arguments wherein statements could either be true or false and it is
indeterminate for purposes of the argument which is the case. For
statements about reality, we are generally ONLY concerned with true
statements and do not generally express false ones without explicitly
marking them as hypotheticals or suppositionals or counterfactuals of some
kind.
> > But the use of logical connectives in general is based on the
> > assumption, probably false, that language is attempting to express
> > logical truth. By insisting that the language connectives follow the
> > rules of logic strictly, people will either start thinking in a manner
> > that reflects those rules or they will avoid the use of connectives
> > (or they will break the rules). This is a key design feature for the
> > original purpose of the language as a test of Sapir-Whorf, though I
> > personally think that the formal logical aspects of Lojban don't come
> > into play enough that it will matter much.
>
>Thank you for failing to answer the question. 8)
You're welcome $%)
>No-one has yet managed to tell me what possible use, in actual
>communication, things like o and anai have.
.anai is probably a proper usage to translate "If wishes were horses, then
beggars would ride". My wife and I HAVE used .anai and na.a on occasion in
Lojban conversation. "o" is possibly useful when one wants to say that two
sentences mean essentially the same thing or would be true under the same
conditions; I am not sure that I have ever used it unless it fell out of an
onai involving a negation.
But you seem to be denying the possibility that logical argument is a valid
purpose of "actual communication". Political discussions seem like ripe
possibilities for logical connectives. But political discussions are not
statements about reality, but rather about ideas, so that the truth
conditions are somewhat more uncertain than when you are telling your kid
what to do.
Robin Lee Powell
in lojban are based on predicate logic, and that I know how to do that,
here's some more on logical connective usage.
Take the sentence:
ko ca gasnu le nu le do kumfa ku cnici
Call that sentence C. C is true iff, at a time that is more-or-less
'now', the child in the agentive cause of eir room becoming tidy.
Next, we have:
mi ba curmi le nu do klama le panka
Call that sentence P. P is true iff, at a time that is more-or-less in
the future, the parent gives the child permission to go to the park. I
take it as obvious that P implies that such permission is not currently
given (or there would be no ba tag).
Take:
C .inaja P
Or, alternatively:
If C then P
using standard predicate logic meaning of 'If ... then ...'.
Then we have the standard 4 cases:
The child cleans eir room. Afterwards, the parent gives the child
permission to go to the park. Clearly, with P and C both true, C -> P
is true.
The child cleans eir room. Afterwards, the parent does not give the
child permission to go to the park. C -> P is false, ergo the parent
lied (stated a false predication; what else could lying be in a logical
language?).
The child does not clean eir room. C is false, C -> P is therefore
always true. This is actually really useful, because at this point
_anything_ follows, including the parent giving the child a whuppin'.
8)
However, for maximum clarity it would perhaps be best to use
C .ijo P
so that if the child does not clean eir room, and the parent allows the
child to go to the park, the parent has lied again. Which the parent
will probably reluctant to do, so this helps constrain the parent to not
change eir mind.
-Robin
Robin Lee Powell
> At 02:00 PM 04/30/2001 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> >On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 03:53:18PM -0400, Rob Speer wrote:
> > > Okay, I should have looked a little harder. Your C does have a 'ko' in it.
> >
> >Correct. Note that either ko binding stops at the .ijo, or jbofi'e has
> >a bug in it.
>
> I believe that variable binding must continue across an .ijo boundary
> because such a sentence pair can in theory be re-expressed as a single
> sentence having identical meaning (subject to some special rules for
> negation and the like), using gi'o or using go...gi, and the
> presumption in either case would be that the ko has scope over the
> entire compound bridi.
Why?
Once again, either your wrong or jbofi'e has a bug:
go ko viska gi cusku
(0[go {ko viska} gi cusku])0
And I see no indication of such scoping in the grammar, but that proves
very little.
Note that, IMO, you're moving the definitions in the wrong direction.
IIRC, go...gi is _defined_ as a shortform for a two sentence connective.
> However, missing the context that led to the current example, one
> should not being using a logical connective to express this room/park
> conditional, because there is time-order or causality involved. The
> room being cleaned may be necessary, sufficient, preceding, or
> causally determining whether the child goes to the park; the two
> clauses do not in fact have independent truth values as is necessary
> to use logical connectives.
I disagree, because whether the child cleans eir room and whether the
parent gives permission to go to the park are independent by default,
but assuming you're right.
Two questions, then:
1. What's the point of allowing things like .ijobabo?
2. What is the use of conditionals other than .e?
-Robin
Robin Lee Powell
> At 02:48 PM 04/30/2001 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> >2. What is the use of conditionals other than .e?
>
> Well, "a" expressing alternation (and anai for conditional) has a pretty
> clear usage, and onai for exclusive-or does as well.
anai does not have a clear usage, or we wouldn't be having this
discussion.
> But the use of logical connectives in general is based on the
> assumption, probably false, that language is attempting to express
> logical truth. By insisting that the language connectives follow the
> rules of logic strictly, people will either start thinking in a manner
> that reflects those rules or they will avoid the use of connectives
> (or they will break the rules). This is a key design feature for the
> original purpose of the language as a test of Sapir-Whorf, though I
> personally think that the formal logical aspects of Lojban don't come
> into play enough that it will matter much.
Thank you for failing to answer the question. 8)
No-one has yet managed to tell me what possible use, in actual
communication, things like o and anai have.
-Robin
Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)
>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.)
lenu do nicygau ledo kumfa cu selja'e lenu mi curmi lenu do klama le panka
py...@aol.com
--part1_18.c464136.282365bb_boundary
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
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In a message dated 5/2/2001 8:08:06 PM Central Daylight Time,
aro...@uclan.ac.uk writes:
>
>
> ko broda da
>
> means
>
> I hereby command that there be some da such that do broda da
>
> and not
>
> There is some da such that I hereby command that do broda da
>
> which cannot be expressed in Lojban satisfactorily.
>
{da zo'u ko broda da} and probably {da se broda ko}. Structure words aside,
extending scope requires anaphora of the scope determiner (here ko = do).
--part1_18.c464136.282365bb_boundary
Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"><FONT SIZE=2>In a message dated 5/2/2001 8:08:06 PM Central Daylight Time,
<BR>aro...@uclan.ac.uk writes:
<BR>
<BR>
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">
<BR>
<BR> ko broda da
<BR>
<BR>means
<BR>
<BR> I hereby command that there be some da such that do broda da
<BR>
<BR>and not
<BR>
<BR> There is some da such that I hereby command that do broda da
<BR>
<BR>which cannot be expressed in Lojban satisfactorily.
<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>{da zo'u ko broda da} and probably {da se broda ko}. Structure words aside,
<BR>extending scope requires anaphora of the scope determiner (here ko = do). </FONT></HTML>
And Rosta
[...]
#As I pointed out, the sumti connectives are relatively easy to find uses for.
ok
#> 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.
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?
--And.
And Rosta
#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,
#> #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}.
Thanks. I have been reading the thread, but I still don't see how you reach
the conclusion that
"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 see nothing at all wrong with translating the sentence with "ijo".
Complications are added by your suggestion of "ko". The English is
not an imperative, and the translation does not require "ko". Of course
there are English sentences like:
Clean your room and I'll let you go to the park.
Take one more step and you're dead.
Clean your room or I won't let you go to the park.
Stop or I'll shoot.
and these present some semantic issues much debated in linguistics.
#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.)
I would translate your English sentence with ijo but changing "ko" to "do".
Your Lojban sentence means to me either (a) "Iff you go to the park, I hereby
order you to clean your room", or (b) "I hereby order that iff you go to the
park you clean your room", which is close to what you want, but allows
that the addressee may neither go to the park nor clean their room.
(a) seems silly, but seems right for "Queue here if you want to see the film"
= "Iff you want to see the film I hereby instruct you to queue here".
These problems arise because {ko} conflates both the command and
the reference to the addressee. These are logically separate and if
they're not linguistically separable then problems ensue.
#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.
I don't think implications need be translated at all. Just translate the meaning
the sentence encodes, and what the original implicates the translation will
also implicate. For example, your English example implicates a command
without encoding it, and hence the Lojban can perfectly well do the
same.
#Incidentally, I'd like to see how this "conditional" would be constructed. I'd
#rather not hunt through the archives of the list.
You mean how to translate the English sentence? Well, to repeat, mine
is:
do nicygau ledo kumfa .ijo mi curmi le nu do klama le panka
--And.
Jay Kominek
On Wed, 2 May 2001, Rob Speer wrote:
> 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.)
le nu do nicygau le do kumfa cu rinka le nu mi curmi le nu do klama le
panka
I think a modal like va'o is appropriate:
mi ba curmi le nu do klama le panka kei va'o le nu do mu'o nicygau le do
kumfa
Or maybe replace the va'o... with "va'o le za'i nicygau le do kumfa"
(Maybe the parent doesn't care who or how the room becomes clean. It
simply has to be clean before they will allow their child to go.)
As a further bit of nit picking, "ko" seems completely in appropriate to
me, especially if you want an accurate translation. The parent is simply
telling the child what will happen, not commanding it to happen. (Though I
must admit, when I pointed this out to my parents when I was a child, they
didn't buy into it.)
I'm of the opinion that logic simply doesn't come into this at all. Its
not a logical sort of statement, its purely conditional.
- Jay Kominek <jay.k...@colorado.edu>
Waiting Is.
And Rosta
> aro...@uclan.ac.uk writes:
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
> ko broda da
>
> means
>
> I hereby command that there be some da such that do broda da
>
> and not
>
> There is some da such that I hereby command that do broda da
>
> which cannot be expressed in Lojban satisfactorily.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>
> {da zo'u ko broda da} and probably {da se broda ko}. Structure words
> aside, extending scope requires anaphora of the scope determiner (here
> ko = do).
Three responses.
1. Your proposal is counter to current convention, which is that {ko}
means "make this sentence true if {ko} were replaced by {do}".
2. Your proposal seems unable to cope with the contrast between (b) and
(c):
a. "I command that you cause her to eat something."
="I command that you cause that there be something that she eats."
b. "I command that there be something that you cause her to eat."
c. "There is something that I command you to cause her to eat."
3. There are much more common and more serious problems with the scope
of imperative operators than ones like (a-c). Consider (d/d'):
d. Make a note of my telephone number.
d'. Make a note of a telephone number of mine.
This means (e/e'):
e. For my telephone number, make it the case that you make a note of it.
e'. For a telephone number of mine, make it the case that you make a note
of it.
It does NOT mean (f):
f. Make it the case that you make a note of my telephone number.
f'. Make it the case that you make a note of a telephone number of mine.
-- for these would be satisfied if you wrote down any old number but then
took steps to make sure that the phone company assigned this number to me.
--And.
Richard Curnow
>
> Once again, either your wrong or jbofi'e has a bug:
>
> go ko viska gi cusku
> (0[go {ko viska} gi cusku])0
>
> And I see no indication of such scoping in the grammar, but that proves
> very little.
Note that
ko go viska gi cusku
is also valid, and in this case the ko _will_ be viska1 and cusku1 if
that's what you wanted. In your example, ko is only viska1 and cusku is
an observative with an implied X1.
FWIW,
ko gu'o viska gi cusku
is also valid and probably means about the same as my go/gi version.
--
Richard P. Curnow, Weston-super-Mare, UK
http://www.rrbcurnow.freeuk.com/
email:ric...@rrbcurnow.freeuk.com email:r...@myself.com
Rob Speer
>
> la robyspir cusku di'e
>
> >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
>
> I certainly don't think that you can't use them. I only said that
> they are not the best translations of such sentences. The child is
> being told that two situations are both true or both false together,
> with no hint as to why that should be so. A slight improvement would
> be to add a {nu'e}, then at least it would be clear that the parent
> is saying that they're prepared to act in such a way as to make the
> claim true, which is a bit more informative.
Aha, that does help clear things up.
{do bazi nicygau ledo klama .ijo nu'e mi curmi lenu do klama le panka}
I think that this makes {nu'e} apply to {.ijo} so that the parent promises to
make {.ijo} true.
> Then it becomes a
> promise/threat instead of a mere claim about reality. (Asking the
> child to make the claim true is not reasonable because it would
> mean they had to predict the future. The parent would not be lying
> if the ko-sentence ends up being false, the one who issues a command
> is not the one who has to make it true.) Even with {nu'e}, there is
> no hint as to which of the two possibilities the parent has a
> preference for.
This can be resolved with an attitudinal as well.
{e'o do bazi nicygau ledo klama .ijo nu'e mi curmi lenu do klama le panka}
I still don't exactly like {do bazi}. Is there a way to modify {ko} to make it
only apply to the bridi it's in? {koku} or something of the sort?
> In any case, do use such constructions if you like
> them. If they are used like that too often, they will probably end
> up acquiring those causality connotations that their similars have
> in English.
That would be good, because they're rather useless without them.
--
Rob Speer
Jorge Llambias
la robyspir cusku di'e
>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 certainly don't think that you can't use them. I only said that
they are not the best translations of such sentences. The child is
being told that two situations are both true or both false together,
with no hint as to why that should be so. A slight improvement would
be to add a {nu'e}, then at least it would be clear that the parent
is saying that they're prepared to act in such a way as to make the
claim true, which is a bit more informative. Then it becomes a
promise/threat instead of a mere claim about reality. (Asking the
child to make the claim true is not reasonable because it would
mean they had to predict the future. The parent would not be lying
if the ko-sentence ends up being false, the one who issues a command
is not the one who has to make it true.) Even with {nu'e}, there is
no hint as to which of the two possibilities the parent has a
preference for. In any case, do use such constructions if you like
them. If they are used like that too often, they will probably end
up acquiring those causality connotations that their similars have
in English.
co'o mi'e xorxes
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Rob Speer
> 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
Jorge Llambias
la robyspir cusku di'e
>Aha, that does help clear things up.
>{do bazi nicygau ledo klama .ijo nu'e mi curmi lenu do klama le panka}
{nu'e} is a vocative, (although like every vocative but {doi} it
should have been a UI) so it has to be {nu'edo'u}.
>I think that this makes {nu'e} apply to {.ijo} so that the parent promises
>to
>make {.ijo} true.
Yes, I agree that should be the interpretation. {i nu'e go ... gi ...}
would make it perfectly clear though, and there {do'u} is ellidable.
> > Even with {nu'e}, there is
> > no hint as to which of the two possibilities the parent has a
> > preference for.
>
>This can be resolved with an attitudinal as well.
>{e'o do bazi nicygau ledo klama .ijo nu'e mi curmi lenu do klama le panka}
Yes, as a promise it works much better than as a statement.
>I still don't exactly like {do bazi}. Is there a way to modify {ko} to make
>it
>only apply to the bridi it's in? {koku} or something of the sort?
You could say:
{ko nicygau ledo kumfa i go'i ijo nu'edo'u mi curmi lenu do klama
le panka}
co'o mi'e xorxes
And Rosta
#I have _no_ idea where people are getting this idea that ko carries
#across a logical connective between sentences, but the grammar doesn't
#seem to bear this out.
Inter alia, it is perhaps an intuitive awareness of the fact that the
illocutionary operator component of ko, "I hereby command that",
has maximally wide scope over other elements, so that
ko broda da
means
I hereby command that there be some da such that do broda da
and not
There is some da such that I hereby command that do broda da
which cannot be expressed in Lojban satisfactorily.
--And.
Jorge Llambias
la lojbab cusku di'e
>.anai is probably a proper usage to translate "If wishes were horses, then
>beggars would ride".
I doubt that very much, what translation do you have in mind?
Unless you're going to try some quantification over possible
worlds or something like that (not really easy to do in Lojban)
then I don't see how {anai} would help you. A straightforward
use of {anai} would be vacuously true because wishes are not horses,
it would be as true as "if wishes were horses, then wishes would
not be horses", which is obviously not what is wanted.
And Rosta
#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"?
And "I drink milk only in coffee and coffee only with milk" could
involve "milk o coffee".
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.
--And.
Rob Speer
> #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
michael helsem
li'o
>By insisting that
>the language connectives follow the rules of logic strictly, people will
>either start thinking in a manner that reflects those rules or
>they will
>avoid the use of connectives (or
>they will break the rules).
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