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Mike S., On 27/08/2012 20:55:
On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:02 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote:
Mike S., On 27/08/2012 05:20:
Brevity trumps grammatical simplicity.
Formalization is the real trick, not brevity, so formalization must
trump brevity if this is to be a "logical language" and not a fancy
version of Ray Brown's BrSc. Simplicity abets formalization. When
formalization is complete, nothing need preclude brevity-driven
overhauls and reforms.
Formalization is easy; brevity is hard. Without brevity, what interest does the project have? Creating a (verbosely) speakable predicate logic is trivial. Brevity must be the guiding principle. A logical language is one that encodes logical structure (predicate--argument, operator--variable structure) -- preferably unambiguously.
> If you want to say "[sa sma] xkra" instead of "[la xrma] xkra", then
> you can just say "xkro'e".
How about "sa sma se sme prmake"?
prmo'e.
How come? Are you sure?
> All of that aside, would provide any method way to create a sort of
> anaphor that would be represented by free variables? If so, how would
> it work?
I don't see a need for free variables. Variables not explicitly bound can be implicitly bound or can be of the abbreviatory a'a sort.
(1) na sa xrja vfla. na se sme [la sma] nlveka.
"Pigs don't fly. Something has no wings."
I don't think it'd be long before humans started hearing that as:
(2) na sa xrja vfla. na se sme [la xrja] nlveka.
"Pigs don't fly. They have no wings."
... and then started hearing [la Ra] everywhere. Do you disagree?
I don't disagree, tho (2) is unlikely given the availability of the set of variables that are interpreted as definites when unbound.
It seems reasonable to me to formalize the interpretation most likely to prevail, and that's useful to boot.
I do disagree with this. It doesn't seem reasonable to rigidify common patterns of interpretation. For example, conjuncts linked by _and_ are commonly interpreted as presented in the sequence in which they occurred, but I think it would be a really bad idea to formalize that. And there are downsides to the proposed rule. It creates an otherwise unwanted assymmetry between the two complements of s and l. It requires holding in memory both the restrictions on variables and the name of the variable even outside the syntactic domain of the variable.
As for anaphors, I'd use a pair of predicates meaning "co'e", one with and one without a description argument as a syntactic complement. E.g. "xx-" is "co'e", "is it", and "Xz" has the extra complement, "xza qa grka" (or indifferently, "xza qo grko", "is the dog", where "q" is the ce'u quantifier and "qa grka" means "the property of being canine". maybe you wouldn't consider these anaphors, in which case I'm saying I don't see the need for anaphors.
If "xza qa grka" means is "is the dog", does that mean a specific
dog, or does it mean dogs in general?
A specific dog, tho that specific dog could be the generic dog.
There's also the possibility of using stems like qam- (= 'am-), where qa- introduces vowelless name stems, and the name is taken to refer to something already referred to with a predicate starting with m- (ignoring any name-introducing prefix), like Lojban my.
That was always a nice scheme, but I think that Xorban's explicitly
bound variables tend to obviate the need for that.
But this scheme is used for predicates or referents that are repeated across sentences. --And.