WikiDiscuss

WikiDiscuss


baupla fuzykamni

posts: 2388

Well, I see the point, but going against a couple
thousand years of tradition — in logic and
(though for a shorter time) programming languages
-- militates against the change. As usual, we
need to think about what we mean before we speak.
If we want some counterfactual conditional, then
we don't want {janai}, but that doesn't mean that
{janai} is not "if," just that it is not that
"if." Lojban is not English and so we should not
expect that every English word gets a one-on-one
Lojban one. It doesn't help, of course, that the
correct Lojban expression for the other English
"if" has never been authoritatively specified (it
is presumably {da'i} in some construction but the
details are fuzzy).



> Re: baupla fuzykamni
> A propsal:
>
> This is only half in jest. Maybe less than
> half.
>
> I suggest that in the BPFK's re-write of the
> CLL, we excise the word
> "if" from
>
http://lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter14.html
> entirely. Or at least where it's used to
> describe na ja and ja nai
> and such. "ja nai" doesn't mean "first is true
> if second is true",
> it means "either (the first is true) or
> (neither the first nor the
> second is true)" (the truth table being TTFT)
> and using the
> "standard" logical term of "if" has lead to one
> of the most common
> purely semantic Lojban errors.
>
> -Robin
>
>
>
>
>