[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
la and cusku di'e
The one thing I feel relatively strongly about is that all restricted quantification should behave alike, with respect to importingness. Given that, we have two possibilities,
Nobody had argued for that position in this round. If all
quantifiers had to be importing or all non-importing, the
most natural choice would be importing, because non-importing
su'o is not very intuitive. But negation reverses import,
so if we want to maintain {no = naku su'o}, {ro = naku me'i}
(and I do want to) then te best choice is universals (ro and no)
without import and particulars (su'o and me'i) with import.
The forms with import are easy to get anyway: {ro lo su'o broda}
and {no lo su'o broda}, which do require a non-empty set of
broda. These forms are not however the negation of the su'o and
me'i forms in all cases.
But what you say for all quantifiers does apply to {ro} which
seems to be the only contentious one, even though {no} and {me'i}
can be equally argued for both ways.
1. RQ is importing. Therefore DeMorgan fails to apply to RQ when the quantified set is empty. But it is so meaningless to quantify an empty set that we would never want to do it, so it is of no practical consequence whether DeMorgan applies to it.
We don't normally want to quantify an empty set that we know to be empty, that's true, but sometimes we may not know it.
2. RQ is nonimporting. But it is so meaningless to apply RQ to an empty set that RQ always implicates a nonempty set. DeMorgan applies to RQ, but again this is of no practical consequence.
The claims with ro quantification over empty sets are always vacuously true in one system and vacuously false in the other system, these claims are always meaningless in that sense. But you can say things like: Every year since 1995, I have passed every exam that I took that year, except in 1999, when I failed one exam. Do we want that to entail that I took at least one exam every year since 1995, or just that I did not fail any exam in any year but 1999. Griceanly we may conclude that I took at least some exam most of those years, otherwise we would not want to make such a general claim (for example, if I only took an exam in 1999 the claim would still be true but misleading.)
If the choice is between (1) and (2), as I think it should be, then it is hard to see how anybody could give a shit which one is chosen. If it comes down to this choice and a vote on it, I will abstain; I'd be equally happy with tossing a coin to decide it.
The choice this round is between (A-E-I+O+) and (A+E-I+O-),
but in other rounds there were advocates for (A+E+I+O+) as well.
I definitely think that the first one is the way to go, but the
third I find preferrable to the second. O- ("not all" without
import) is really unpallatable to me.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail