Re: Logic in Languages

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Christopher Bates wrote:

> THanks everyone for your help with lenition before... I was reading the
> "case mismatches" thread and I wondered something. How common are
> varations on the placement of logical.. well... operators from the way
"Logical operators" are what they get called in linguistics terminology
too.

> we do in english. Like we say:
>
> X and Y
> X or Y
> etc
> Do any natural languages adopt a different structure? For instance:
>
> and X Y
I personally have seen:
X and Y
X and Y and
X Y and
and X and Y
X Y

I have never seen and a typologist once told me he has never seen:
and X Y

> but it seems to me that if the operation comes before its two arguments
> as in "or Z and X Y" or "and X or Y Z" then which is meant is
> unambiguous. I know latin has some strange ways of doing things like
> anding... like adding "que" onto the end of the second argument. Latin
> also has a way of indication xor... do many natural languages make the
> distinction between or and xor? What about operations such as nand? I
> don't think we really have anything in English that approximates nand...
> you'd have to say "either X or Y or neither"... for nor "either both or
> neither" etc. What language has the most words for such things? Natural
> language I mean... I'm not interested in created logical languages or
> anything like that...
There are languages with multiple types of what English uses "and" for.
For example, in the Athabaskan language Slave, they have plain-vanilla
"and", "and" implying only two participants are involved, "and" indicating
that both individuals were in the same event, and "and" indicating that
though there were multiple individuals they were not acting as a unit or
group.

In Southern Tepehuan they have two forms of "and", one indicating that
there is a logical or temporal connection between the conjuncts: "I
put on my shoes and socks", "The booth was selling shirts and necklaces",
etc. A different operator indicates that the conjuncts are dissimilar:
"Owls and bats hunt at night."

When dealing with coordinated sentences, there are languages where the
conjunctions tell whether the two clauses have the same subject or not,
or dictate the tense of the second conjunct relative to the first.

Logical operators is a very interesting topic in natural language. Of
course, you mustn't confuse them with the operators of math or logic,
because they simple don't work the same.

Marcus

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