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Re: [jboske] Digest Number 135



At 01:48 AM 12/28/02 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
On Sat, 28 Dec 2002, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> 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?

That sentence is perfectly grammatical (I just checked).  What is the problem?

(No idea what the reference to Nixon is).

> > 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.

If people buy my gismu note of last night, we can use girzu and forgo English words that do not convey what we have in mind.

> 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.

No. I believe that the language definition has lots of holes in it, and lots of hooks on which to build structures in usage to fill those holes. What I did not believe is that the language definition had many mistakes in it; I am less sure about this, but "many" remains a non-specific number.

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@hidden.email
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org