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John:
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > My first thought was "But that's obviously merely a question of the
> > scope of the existential quantifier" ("Bring it about that there are
> > nails that you hand me" v. "There are nails that I command you hand
> > me"),
>
> So it is, but Gua\spi doesn't have explicit machinery for quantifiers
> and bound variables any more than English does: though a descendant of
> Loglan, it is in a very real sense not a loglan
You know guaspi far better than I do, but if it does quantifiers as
predicates (and has a way of indicating variables bound by the
quantifier-predicate), then it ought to be able to handle it. Maybe
not in this particular case, which involves imperatives, but in the
case of "I will bring you nails", say.
> > "A minute ago, I ate an apple (any apple)"
> >
> > would mean. If you could find a sensible interpretation for that, then
> > the guaspi gadri would be vindicated. I think the only sensical
> interpretation
> > is to read it as Unique: if "I ate x" is true of
> > any apple, and if x is an apple, then there must be exactly one
> > apple
>
> The trouble with this and similar examples is that the unrestricted
> use of "any" they show is simply alien to my English, and I have
> little or no intuition about it. For me, "I am married to any woman"
> is quite ungrammatical
For me too. The thought-experiment involved extrapolating from the
cases that make sense for English to the cases that don't.
> > I wish that Loglan had had the good sense to use jimc's ideas, instead
> > of casting him out as a heretic.
>
> Jimc was the xorxes of his day: prolific author in a variant dialect
So he is a terrible lesson to the community: "do not shun your most
talented members merely because they see things that you with
your narrower horizons do not!" Or maybe not; probably the community
is happy to have a language very different from guaspi.
> > I suppose that Lojban's excuse was
> > that it was constituted to just finish of JCB Loglan and no more than
> > that, except in the addition of sundry sorts of cruft like attitudinals
> > that Lojbab now and again crows about
>
> Grumpy today, aren't we
I wasn't, honestly, but it gives me a real twinge of pain when I discover
that Loglan has let good ideas slip through its fingers.
> Gua\spi, from the Lo??an perspective, discards the baby with the bathwater
I suppose there is room for disagreement about what is baby and what
is bathwater, but my wish was that Loglan had kept the baby and
discarded the bathwater, instead of discarding jimc.
--And.