Mike S. scripsit:
> Where we disagree is that I consider the tanru mechanism to be a sort
> of relief valve, not the bedrock of an entire logical language, as it
> is in Lojban.
As is the case in Gua\spi.
> I don't see anything inherently broken about "small stars",
The trouble is that the set of small things isn't well-defined. It's like
the house in _The Phantom Tollbooth_ where the world's largest giant and
world's smallest giant
the world's largest dwarf live -- on investigation, they are the same:
an ordinary sized person. Loglan resolves this by not having 'small'
but only 'x1 is smaller than x2', with the usual contextual default
for x2. Lojban has 'x1 is small in property x2 compared with norm x3'.
Just having 'x1 is small' is not going to cut it.
> "pretty girls" or "black cats" being expressed as the intersection
These work well as intersections, I think.
Dubious. better as genus-differentia
> I have exactly zero desire to tanruize the entire syntax.
Good.
--
John Cowan cowan@hidden.email http://ccil.org/~cowan
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
--Gerald Holton