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Re: [engelang] intensions & extensions (Xorban)



Jorge Llamb�as, On 16/09/2012 19:32:
On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 1:50 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>  wrote:
Jorge Llamb�as, On 16/09/2012 04:07:

Well, it seems it would be just as easy to define hV in the way dV
is defined, instead of the way fV is defined.

"All the trees fell and I saw it" with fV-like hV is "la ha ro [tree]o
[fall]o vska'aka". I don't see how to do that With dV-like hV.

la ha fa ro trco frlo vska'aka

like:

la da fa ro trco frlo vska'aka

So you could also say:

la ha trxa vska'aka

like

la da trxa vska'aka

"la ha trxa vska'aka" means what I had envisaged "la trxa vska'aka" meaning; and since I had suppose "la ha X Pa" would mean X and Pa are necessarily-same-world, "la ha fa ro trco frlo vska'aka" doesn't seem to mean anything different from "la fa ro trco frlo vska'aka", if in "fa X" we make a distinction between a and X (a being a platonic situation type, and X being something that is the case in some world).

However, if f & h were swapped around, I think it would work. To avoid confusion, I'll use tV rather than hV, and define f as a situation such that in "la fa X Ra", X and Ra are in the same world. In that case, tV could have the grammar of dV, and mean that in "la ta X Ra", X and Ra are not-necessarily-same-world; tV would be the intensionality marker.

la fa la mlta xkra jnve'ika
She knows cats are black

la ta fa la mlta xkra jnve'ika
She believes cats are black

[With "know" here used loosely, in the sense of "true belief" rather than "justified true belief".]

Which example do you mean? I did say (unclearly) that the x2 of
"talk to" could be a "la fa la sma [future greatgrandchild of
hers]a", where "talk to" here means "X speaks and X intends that
the speech be directed to Y".

"talk to a situation/state of affairs" doesn't make much sense to
me.

How do you tell whether something is or isn't a situation? What is it
about situations that make it nonsensical to talk to one?

Well, at the very least, the situation in which someone is a future
greatgrandchild of hers is a situation that contains herself as well
as the greatgrandchild, so if you say she talks to that situation, the
two cases of her talking to the greatgrandchild and her talking to
herself in that situation are not distinguished. I'm now not sure if
in your example "la fa la sma [future greatgrandchild of hers]a", your
using the same variable "a" with two different bindings was meant to
have significance or you just wanted to spare variables. I read it as
equivalent to "le fe la sma [future greatgrandchild of hers]a", and
there's nothing there to tell us that the greatgrandchild inside the
situation is being especially picked by le fe.

OK, good point. "I talked to a future grandchild of mine" is not the same as "I talked to my having a future grandchild".

Nor is "I thought about a future grandchild of mine" (on the intensional reading) equivalent to "I thought about my having a future grandchild", and "I thought about every future grandchild of mine" I can't even find a situational quasicounterpart for.

So now how do we use tV for "I drew each ear of a cat" -- intensional version, where cat and its ears aren't necessarily in same world as drawing, but ears and cat are in same world as each other?

The extensional version is

sa mlta ri krlika pxro'ekaka'a

I guess we could have

sa mlta ri krlika ti pxro'ekika'a

... but as I currently have things, that means that the ears and drawing aren't necessarily same world. I guess that defaults could give us that the cat is in the same world as the ears, too. But it won't work for

Jorge laughed and drew each ear of a cat
la ma xrxe je cmla su mltu ri krliku ti pxro'ekika

which fails to place the laughing and drawing in the same world.

Here's my suggestion, where "smika" means "smi(a)", "a is smi":

lo mo xrxe la ta su mltu ri krliku smika pxro'ekako


In summary, I withdraw my proposal for a fV-like hV, I adopt the proposal for a dV-like intensional tV, with the proviso that bare fV is extensional, and I further propose something equivalent to smika.

I'm not really satisfied with "smika", tho. What we want is something that turns a variable into a predicate, meaning "x2 have the identity/haecceity of x1". Maybe hc-:

lo mo xrxe la ta su mltu ri krliku hcika pxro'ekako


--And.