Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-") - engelang messages

Well, you learn something new every day. Today (last night, actually) I learned that I was wrong (and I apologize, with a pleas of ignorance) when I said that I didn't think lV was sV. To be sure, it is sV with a difference -- having transcendent scope -- but sV nonetheless. And the flip side of that is that short scope lV really are just ordinary sV, thus getting rid of one problem with some of the "constant" variables. I don't yet know whether this settles all the problems, but it takes care of a lot of them. Do we still need [[R]]? Since I never understood what that was or was supposed to do, I don't know.

From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, September 9, 2012 1:48 AM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 9:49 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, September 8, 2012 2:06 AM

Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

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.

Okay, in your proposal, "l-" would be something like a +specific determiner? Not to be confused with +definite, obviously. "la Ra Pa" would mean something like "certain individuals among R are among P"... am I on the right track?

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?

That's a very complicated question. I guess I would have "la Ra" somehow refer to a structure including both metadata about R and the individuals among R. "sa Ra" and "ra Ra" would refer only to the individuals among R. The effect of applying "la Ra" as an argument would vary from predicate to predicate, but it would vary in a way predictable from the meaning of the predicate.

I think I understand why you asked this question, but it's rather pointless to seriously go into a lot of detail on translating Xorban into a programming language without clarifying exactly what we'd hope to accomplish. We can try to emulate certain things, but no machine understands human language at this point in time, and Xorban is a human language.

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.

Well, right now I tentatively believe that "la Ra" is defined and consistent, a result of this thread totally unexpected but happily received by Yours Truly. It means "sa [[R]]a" and also "ra [[R]]a". We will inevitably have a longer discussion about the exact meaning and ramifications of [[R]], but I think "l-" itself is fine. There are also some minor complications right now with one or two of the needed identities, but nothing that should be too controversial.