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

Thanks. That was the clearest explanation of what & means by l that I have seen. It does not need to be a presupposition, however, since it can just be part of the meaning of the _expression_. It also does not explain the rest of what happens, that this unique la bcda fgha means that ra bcda fgha and sa bcda fgha. One possibility, though not likely, I think, given the example of a black cat is that (harking back to an old Loglan story) lo bcd is just the set of all bcd. If that is true, then la is bcd in a different way from sa and ra, usually -- oe maybe it is fgh differently. I can't think of another way to make this work -- and I can't think of any reason to have it work that way.

From: Martin Bays <mbays@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 9:13 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

* Tuesday, 2012-09-11 at 02:25 +0100 - And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>:

> John E Clifford, On 10/09/2012 17:12:
>
> > 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.
>
> Experience has proved this to be impossible. Clearly the idea is
> transmissible, since Jorge and I always understand each other and
> agree when we discuss it, but the idea is not transmissible to you.

I'd just like to briefly surface to say that I'd also be very interested
to see an account of this "andoxorxesian" l-.

In an attempt to prompt one, here's the impression I've got from my
half-following of this thread:
you have la Ra Pa doing two things:
    (a) creating a presupposition that the current situation
    contains a unique individual satisfying R;
    (b) binding a to that unique individual.

Is that roughly right? If so, how does (a) work exactly? What's the
scope of the presupposition, and what does "current situation" mean? Am
I right to bring in situations, which I mean in the sense of
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/situations-semantics/, here?

Furthermore, it seems that the intention is that this construction
should work in concert with some ontological assumption that there are
things called "myopic singulars". Is it possible to communicate with you
in the language without understanding what those are? If, as I suspect,
not, could you explain what they are?

Diving back to whence I lurked,

Martin