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Logic in Languages

From:Christopher Bates <christopher.bates@...>
Date:Friday, June 28, 2002, 9:24
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
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

This would be kindof handy because then it clears up some ambiguity. For
instance,
"X and Y or Z" could mean

and(X,or(Y,Z))
or
or(and(X,Y),Z)

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...

That's it for now I guess... thanks in advance everyone,

Chris B.

Replies

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
Dennis Paul Himes <himes@...>