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

I assume you mean each person is unlikely to dislike his/her own mother rather than that it is likely that some persons does dislike their own mother. ra prna se mmteka na [likely to dislike] ake. The brackets because I don't know how you would handle "unlikely" (a modal of the statistical sort, I would say) and I am too lazy to run upstairs and check the word for "dislike". I can imagine all sorts of problems with this, mainly of the "suppose he has more than one mother and likes some and not others" variety, which needs more sociological treatment than logical ones.

I always thoguth that english was your native language, yet you seem able to read what you say about your widget and not get immediately puzzled by what it means. If it makes sense to you, please explain it to me. If it doesn't, then that is the evidence that it makes no sense. A is a single thing that has the properties of a cat. So, A is a cat. A cat has properties other than those specified in the encyclopedia for under "cat" or 'mlt' or whatever -- at most, some of these properties are specidied as within the range of possibilities for a particular cat. So, A, as a cat, may be black. Aside from verifying that this a possibility for cats, it doesn't say much about cats other than A. of course, it does verify sa mlta xkra, but not much else (logical equivalents aside). As for your complaint about my way of doing things, I don't see what I do that is non-standard or that somehow requires special rules. Yes, I want to know what makes a sentence true (when that is the relevant issue), but surely you want that too. What is the point of sying something if there is no way of finding out whether it is true? (I leave out theological questions for the nonce.)

From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 10:25 AM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

How do you do "everyone is unlikely to hate their own mother"? With "si mmtika" and/or "ri mmtika", indifferently? I guess "si mmtika" is too weak, so you'd want "ri mmtika".

I of course deny that the Andoxorxesian singulating quantifier makes no sense, and have never seen any evidence that it makes no sense. But this is not because either you or me is an idiot but rather because you want a language whose formal rules tell you precisely which states of affairs involve la mlta, whereas I want a language that lacks such formal rules and leaves these decisions to the users. (What the formal rules do specify is that A is a single thing and has the property specified in the encyclopedia entry for mlt. The rest is up to the users.)

Can't we just agree to work on partly different languages and move the discussion on to something more productive?

On Sep 10, 2012 3:59 PM, "John E Clifford" <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

It doesn't make any sense and every attempt to get some sense out of it has failed. I do think you think you are on to something (always have) but so far you have not gotten around to saying what. "Singularizing quantifier" (other than "there is exactly one ....") is no clearer than "myopic singular". If it just means a bunch of the relevant sort of things, then so does sV properly placed or lV anywhere. If it means something else, what?

From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 9:46 AM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

I agree there's a need for a maximal scope existential quantifier, for the woodcutter, tho I'll address in another msg the question of how to do it in xorban. With regard to your wish to make this the meaning of l, how would you address the point that when you have a category known to have exactly one member, the choice of quantifier for it is redundant, and it is insensitive to scope relative to negation. This is what the (ando)xorxesian singulating quantifier was for, and it covered "everyone loves their own mother" cases too. Is it that you want to get rid of this singulating quantifier completely? if so, what's so wrong with it?

On Sep 10, 2012 2:39 PM, "John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

Well, since you keep mentioning ."known identities", I felt free to introduce one myself -- especially one from Montague. It is not a new quantifier, only a new manner of writing an old one, an afterthought quantifier, if you will. With forethought, I could lay out all the constants I was going to use in my narration and list them at the beginning (what initially took & to be suggesting). But I don't generally know before hand, so I introduce them as they turn up -- but they have the same scope as they would have had were they introduced initially. In effect, I am advocating the particular version of "any", hardly a novel idea.

As for proof, I note that, translating back to standard notation and assuming there is no context, both sides of your equivalence are simply sa Ra na Pa.

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 9, 2012, at 11:20 PM, "Mike S." <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 10:50 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

These communications get rather out of synch. So, to sum up; 'lV' is a particular quantifier (an sV but for one peculiar property) which, wherever it occurs, has scope over the entire discourse and thus is immune to influence from local matters like rV or other sV or na or je. This does mean that somethings which I would have called lVs on analogy with {lo} are, in fact, sVs, since they have only local scope and are affected by negations and other local quantifiers. In particular, the definition of o'e turns out to require an initial sV, not lV..

Okay, am I to understand correctly that you've simply invented a novel quantifier and plopped it into FOL? Or, is it possible to define your "lo/lV" more precisely in terms of pure FOL? Can you for example prove that:

na la Ra Pa <=> la Ra na Pa

... i.e. can you demonstrate that in your system each side is a logically equivalent transformation of the other? Or do you simply declare that that identity is so? What about the other known identities I have mentioned? I want to give your ideas due consideration, but I need to see things a little better defined than this.