Re: [engelang] Xorban Terminology

Now I see why I am having problems.  Lumping all these things together as nary operators misses crucial distinctions among them, it seems to me.  It is still not clear to me, for example, whether d is more like l or m.  I think it is the latter, but the classification leaves that open.  By the way, the discussion around d, though brief, suggests that its F is not veridical, that is daFa does not require that a be an F.  In the case of f, the usage suggests that the context is intensional, that the formula refers across worlds (or is a function that does), but classification makes no note of that.

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From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 4:06 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban Terminology

 

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 4:33 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

 

In connection with one of my problems, where do you place m and d?  f?

They're all unaries, and probably better covered in a primer than in a glossary.

"m" just creates a one-place predicate out of a formula meaning "is known/named by this formula".

"d" is the definite operator, which I take to mean a discourse-dependent choice function picking the salient entities out of a larger extension.  For any formula F, "da F" is the discourse-salient entities fitting "a" in F.  I assume it'd be pretty close to English "the".  If the current topic is a restaurant, "the food" is the food served by that restaurant.  If the current topic is a friend's house, "the kids" are the kids living in that house.  Definites also refer back to entities introduced by indefinites, presumably in Xorban that'd be "s-".  We haven't seen a lot of examples of "d-", so I am not sure this isn't already covered by "l-".

"fa F" means "A is a situation in which F occurs/is true".  I see it as a chunk of space-time.  We've seen plenty of examples of this so far.

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co ma'a mke

Xorban blog: Xorban.wordpress.com
My LL blog: Loglang.wordpress.com