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On Sat, 28 Dec 2002, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> > From: Jordan DeLong <fracture@hidden.email>
> > Subject: Re: Digest Number 134
>
> > [Nice on the big digest-style stuff, Nick. Helps keep the volume
> > down]
>
> Helps keep my sanity. Now you know why I have no proper Reply-To
> headers, though.
Funny kudos from one who railed against mailers that ruined threading.
> > "mi nitcu lenu mi tavla lo mikce" becomes "da poi mikce zo'u mi nitcu
> > le
> > nu mi tavla da". What other way is there to render it?
>
> Wait, wait.
>
> su'o da poi mikce zo'u: mi nitcu lenu mi tavla da (transparent, de re):
> There is one doctor that I want to talk to
One or more from the set of existing doctors, but not a specific one or
more.
> (Think of the outer prenex as a casting call, and a model-theoretic
> interpretation as a casting. If you want to talk to Dr Jay and not Dr
> Kay, you can truthfully say
>
> pa da poi mikce zo'u: mi nitcu lenu mi tavla da
pa da poi mikce truthfully applies to any doctor, including Dr. Kay.
> When the prenex is inside the proposition (opaque, de dicto), the
> casting call does not affect the contents of the embedded proposition,
> because the embedded proposition is its own world. So
The terms "transparent", "opaque", "de re", "de dicto", "embedded
proposition", and "casting call" are unknown to me and only confusing me
more. Embedded Proposition, I assume, means abstraction bridi (which we
should probably be using a lujvo for already; how about faubri?)
> pa ninmu cu djica lenu tavla pa mikce
>
> is by default not:
>
> pa da poi ninmu ku'o
> pa de poi mikce zo'u:
> da djica lenu tavla de
>
> because, when the casting is held, you can plug in Ms May and Dr Jay,
> and say
>
> la meis. djica lenu tavla la djeis. (to .enai la keis. toi)
My disagreement with the .enai part follows from my earlier objection.
> But Ms May wants to talk to Any Doctor --- whether it's Jay, Kay, or
> Hay. So we get the doctor out of the prenex up front, and put it inside
> the embedded proposition:
>
> pa da poi ninmu zo'u:
> da djica lenu
> pa de poi mikce zo'u:
> da tavla de
OK, that was a Nixon Prenex; illegal in Lojban, aren't they? How do we do
it in Lojban then?
But I understand the gist, and it's interesting. 1. It has to do with the
time of evaluation of variables, which has been an issue in other places
in Lojban as well, such as an uncooperative reading of "jei" which turns
it immediately into a digit, rendering it very useless. 2. I believe we
need to use ko'a for in-mind creatures like May and Jay.
ko'a nitcu lo mikce
There's a particular person who needs one or more unspecified doctors.
> > Can someone explain this tuples-vs-sets distinction to me? When I use
> > the word "tuple", I mean "ordered list of fixed but unspecified size".
> > Or is "tuple" being used here as a cover term for "duo, trio, quartet,
> > ..."
> > rather than "pair, triple, quadruple, ..."?
>
> As usual, I don't know what I'm talking about.
In this discussion, "set" has meant the nearly useless mathematical
object which has only a few, rarely needed qualities, like membership and
number of members. n-tuple was introduced, I thought, as a general term
for "gang", which may or may not have qualities of its members.
I refuse to be distracted by the supervisor's role in collective bevri,
any more than I'll be baited to consider adding the piano, the walking
surface, or the gravitational field, all of which are absolutely necessary
for the act of nu loi nanmu cu bevri. These things may be requisites for
nu li'o but they are NOT members of the collective of loi bevri.
> Bob will himself tell you (and he said it to the board) that he wasn't
> expecting Usage Decides to deviate from the baseline so wilfully and
> soon.
They also believed the language definition had fewer holes in it than it
does. Do you remember mo'i?
> Excellent point. This is what I was alluding to when I said to xod "I
> don't like it that Lojban is turning into a language of flaggelators"
> --- which is what I do ("Oh, I didn't get intensionals! Woe betide me,
> I shall sin no more! Oh, I had no idea I should have used a termset! I
> shall sin no more! Oh, I don't want a specific event, but any event!
> May I be absolved!")
Flagellate we must, until the One Without Sin appears.
--
// if (!terrorist)
// ignore ();
// else
collect_data ();