On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:29 PM, John E. Clifford
<kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
1. No you can't, as witness the various interplays among the quantifiers.
What exactly are you asking for? If you want FOL, it's there; Xorban "s-" and "r-" are in full force. If you want to speak in human instead, then why not freely use "l-"? If you don't like my proposed formalization, then feel free to give us yours. I want to hear your ideas. If you've been thinking about this for thirty years, then surely you have some constructive observations.
I've given you one plausible interpretation, that l is an ever leftmost quantifier that picks out a bunch of items and sticks with thm throughout its scope. It does the trick and is a familiar feature of natural languages. There are problems with it, xorxes insists, and so it may need some work, but it is not obviously crippled from the getgo.
2. I can translate about 90% of Lojban, less the pragmatic stuff, into FOPL in a fairly rule oriented way. The main problem is with RHEs. With this l, the percentage drops remarkably, since no l sentence goes over. How many loglangs do you know and how much logic?
I know English, FOL, Lojban, and bits of other European languages and some other languages. I also understand programming languages which while inhuman do tend to order one's thoughts in a very precise way. Hopefully, what I write here in the Engelang group stands of its own accord. If not, then I invite you to offer an opposing point of view. I am here to learn.
Good background. But I find it hard to see how, knowing these things, you can swallow this l. Have you thought to translate some passages of Xorban into a programming language? How would you handle l?
3. Lord, I hope so, but thirty years' experience leaves me unhopeful.
This is preposterous. All human languages work fine in practice, so why couldn't a constructed logical language? We just need to adopt the best formalization that we can come up with.
Well, being a logical language poses some restrictions (just what depends upon what we mean by "logical"). One that I think is pretty generally accepted is that the operators are clearly defined and consistent. l is certainly not yet (after thirty five years or so) clearly defined and only dubiously consistent. This is not to say that there is nothing that will do the trick, it is just to say that no one has gotten it yet.