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At 03:49 PM 1/6/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > > (hence what happens > > > when we try to explicate "only" or "just") > > > >I don't know what you mean by these examples > > The logical expansion of English "only" is very long-winded, and I'm not > sure we ever agreed on the logical expansion of English "just". Thus we > added po'o as an abbreviation for the logical long-windedness A good logical language is one that is not only logically precise but also concise.
Why? Formal predicate notation is concise only in using single symbols for concepts. I never made it far in logic class, but it seemed to take very little to end up with quite complex "sentences", and there was no sense that there needed to be abbreviations presented. The concept of using discursives as abbreviations for logical constructs was largely my own, though JCB had discursives that were logically unanalyzed. (I think jimc also had the idea of analyzing discursives logically, and he and pc may have had some go-rounds on this issue before I became involved). JCB's examples of "spoken symbolic logic" in Loglan 1 were generally quite long-winded.
It is positively desirable that lexical form be shorter
than and hence not homomorphous with logical form, but that lexical
form should map unambiguously to logical form. Hence it is not true
to say that the logical form is long-winded, because the language
designer can choose how long-winded the make the lexical form that
encodes it.
{po'o} is not an abbreviation for logical 'only': it is a vaguely-
defined UI that may also cover the ground of, say, 'merely'. It
is a vaguer alternative to logical 'only', not any sort of
abbreviation.
At one point we defined it in terms of a specific sort of logical expansion (which Nick originally proposed, IIRC)
The discussion appears to have been in 1993 http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9305/threads.htmlhaving several threads on the subject, finally resulting in the assignment of po'o. Cowan proposed changing the keyword to "uniquely" rather than "only" to make it clearer as to which sense of "only" was intended, but that change never made it into the cmavo list.
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9305/msg00063.html is a confirmation that I had in mind the "and no other" meaning of "only" http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9305/msg00117.html suggested mi'unai for a(nother) meaning of "only" http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9305/msg00086.html was the actual assignment of po'o
> For example, we have a logical expansion for po'o.
We don't. We know what logical 'only' means, but to the best of my
recollection {po'o} has never meant logical 'only'.
See above. I thought (and still think) that there was, but that the expansion was variable depending on what was being only-ed, and invariably long-winded. It was the desire for a short form that justified a cmavo for "only"
> I am not sure what > happens to that meaning when within a negation. I am quite sure that > people won't consider what happens to that meaning, until someone does the > analysis and calls them on it It is easy to say what happens to logical 'only' within negation.
What is "logical 'only'"? If we could have agreed as to what it was, it would have probably been explicitly adopted.
We can't say what happens to {po'o}, because that has no logical
definition, and nor is there any general account of how UI that
might encode logical meaning interact with other logical elements
in the bridi.
There is *in general* very little account of how cmavo interact with each other. We added a couple of orders of magnitude of EXAMPLES of interaction in CLL, explicating them, above and beyond JCB's total lack of same (and apparently obliviousness to the fact that there were interaction issues at all) as evidenced in Loglan 1.
General accounts of the semantics of any selma'o were never a priority, since we never conceived of selma'o as having a standard semantics, except as implied by their syntax. Remember that for the longest time we were avoiding any pretense of a single theory of semantics. You guys are slowly forcing us into one, but the whole jboske/fundamentalist dispute really seems to be an issue of the necessity and desirability of a semantic theory competing with the metaphysically minimalist approach we took as a design goal, and built the baseline around.
> >In that case, i am all in favour > >of vagueness as an option, but I object to the mistaken notion > >that brevity requires vagueness and logical precision requires > >verbosity > > So you reject the Cowan doctrine about the price of infinite precision > being infinite verbosity? No, not at all. I reject the widespread tacit belief that logical precision is infinite.
Logical semantic precision would be equally infinite as non-logical semantic precision.
So on the one hand we have the deluded newbies, to whom Cowan's dictum is addressed, who come to a logical language misguidedly seeking general precision beyond what a natlang can offer. And on the other hand we have the deluded oldtimers who have taken Cowan's dictum to heart, but fail to understand that it doesn't apply to logical precision (because of its very limited and finite nature).
You want logically precise semantics, rather than logically precise syntax (which we have).
> > > >"pa lo re si'e" would be a continuous half, such as is found in a > > > >tin of apricot halves > > > > > > Huh? "pa lo re si'e means nothing to me, since I have trouble > > > contemplating a si'e greater than 1 > > > >Read the ma'oste (entry for si'e) and you will understand. In learning > >Lojban it is important that you should read the ma'oste > > I wrote it. I know you wrote it. But you obviously had forgotten what you had written. Read the entry for si'e and you will see that resi'e means 1/2. > Read the entry for piresi'e That is the entry for piresi'e. If you read through the ma'oste you will see that 1/2 can be said as resi'e or pimusi'e.
There are no examples of integer quantifiers on si'e in the ma'oste. The concept that resi'e and pimusi'e would mean the same thing seems very mind-boggling
Jorge indeed raised this very question, and Cowan answered it in the way I would expect (though he typoed si'e)
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9412/msg00005.html
You may opine that the ma'oste is mabla, but at least you would know what resi'e means, since ma'oste is baselined.
resi'e is not in the cmavo list that I can see.
resi'e = x1 is a 2th portion of mass x2
The definition was poorly worded. Trying to define things baseline-ably in 100 characters with no examples was something we never intended, and no one checked my wordings before baselining (which I never wanted to do before the dictionary). But a "2th" portion is not English-grammatical anyway (nor is a 1/2th, I'll admit)
lo resi'e = at least one thing that is a countable half of something
Only if you assume that a 2th is a half.(I'll admit that I would understand "a 5th" as "a fifth", but I don't think we in fact use that abbreviation in discussing a fifth of whiskey)
> >It's still a meaningful question, because a sentence has to mean > >something -- it's not a meaningless string of words > > In Lojban, we do not presume that all legal strings of words have defined > meaning Are you saying that a default quantifier can be something that turns the sentence into a legal but meaningless string of words?
We wouldn't define a default that rendered the result meaningless. Rather, we would attempt to define a meaning for the quantified result.
> >So the question > >is, when you interpret a sentence containing "li", what is by default > >the quantifier on li? The answer, I would hope, is that it is unquantified > > John corrects me that we allow a quantifier on li. It is meaningless to > say that it is "unquantified". If a quantifier can go there, then it is > quantified. He says he specifies what the default quantifier is in CLL So how do we talk about numbers without quantification? That is, how do you talk about 2, rather than a 2 or every 2?
With MEX. The concept of "a 2" or "every 2" makes no sense to me. If Cowan assigned a default quantifier to "li", I am not sure why or how he made the decision (though he probably ran an argument by me on the phone at the time).
> > > If John is right and we can use set descriptions for collections,
the the
> > > answer may be different. I would be inclined to use "piro" on lo'i
and ro
> > > on le'i, but if something other than this was said in CLL, I wouldn't
> > > likely argue
> >
> >Why would you not use {mo'e zi'o}? Why do you insist on quantification?
>
> I don't. But you can in fact put a quantifier there. So the question is
> what that quantifier is when it is ellipsized.
You don't have to assume it is elliptized. You could take the veiw that
the absence of an overt quantifier means the absence of a covert one.
We did not make that assumption, which never would have occurred to me.
Even if you had some objection to that, you could make the elliptized quantifier mo'ezi'o.
zi'o was not around at the time, and I still don't really accept zi'o even if I can vaguely understand it when used.
> These sorts of arguments on
> default quantifiers came from just the same sorts of efforts by earlier
> jboskeists to try to assign logical meanings to strings that were
> grammatical but not logically explicit. Some of those logical meanings
> were useful ones, so that we can say "lo broda" without having to say "su'o
> lo broda".
This one is not a very good example, because we can say "su'o broda";
{lo} is a comparatively useless gadri.
Until late 1994, su'o broda was distinct from su'o lo broda, and I never agreed to conflate the two, and I still don't like it. That was Cowan's decision based on his understanding of the debate of the time. That you guys have finally come up with reasons why they should not have been conflated merely vindicates my instincts. I believe that su'o broda was su'o da poi broda and lo broda was not defined in terms of da poi broda so su'o lo broda was not. I don't remember and likely did not understand the justification for merging the two, and at one time HAD understoof the reason for treating them separately.
(It was that debate BTW, that started me on the path from dropping out of these discussions - I could not communicate my instincts in ways that you guys could understand, and I got tired of having my words twisted in knots that I could not unravel in a reasonable amount of time).
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