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Re: [jboske] putative tense scope effects (was: RE:



la xod. cusku di'e

This whole issue has seriously dampened my enthusiasm for Lojban! I am now
forced to revise my internal understanding of the Bridi. The CLL is
totally not clear on these issues which are actually crucial and
fundamental to Lojban. You logickers are simply able to translate your
knowledge over, and this all seems natural to you, but I've never learned
formal logic. Had it been made clear that it was a prerequisite, I would
have.

When I started with Lojban, I also had never studied formal logic, but I felt that I could not understand some of the discussions well enough, as well as how Lojban worked in general, so I learned enough to get by.

> I thought the relevancy of variable order inside prenexes was
restricted to sentences with prenexes and statements including da. Now,
four years on, I learn that there are secret das inside every lo and le,
such that sumti order totally affects the claim, and that tense sumtcita
location matters. I could be mistaken, but I don't recall seeing any of
this in the chapter on LE, on FA or SE, or on tense sumtcita. If it's
there and I missed it, then it's my bad. But either way it's four years of
intuition down the drain.

I just looked through the relavant chapter, and I can find nothing which explicitly says that lo = da poi, which is extremely surprising to me, since I am not sure how I came to be aware of the equivalence otherwise. (Actually, I suppose it must have been a passing comment on the list by John, but I still had come to know it so thoroughly that I had considered it indisputable.) There are several places where the book says something which in conjunction with something else it says might be taken as evidence that the two expressions are equivalent. OTOH, ch. 16 sec. 6 says that PA broda is equivalent to PA da poi broda, but in ch. 8 sec. 6 it says "so-called indefinite sumti like ``re karce'' [..] [mean] almost the same as ``re lo karce''". I suppose that "almost the same" means that there actually is some difference, and hence a difference between 'da poi karce' and 'lo karce', but I have no idea what it could be (outside of syntactic differences, and considering that 'da poi karce' is 'da poi ke'a karce').

mu'o mi'e .adam.