Re: CHAT: Re : Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

John Cowan wrote:
>
> Ed Heil scripsit:
>
> > It could be that Charles Sanders Pierce was right after all, and
> > there are three ultimate categories of experience: Firstness,
> > Secondness, and Thirdness, and that any relation involving more than
> > three participants is reducible to relations among three participants,
> > but that trinary relations are not reducible.
>
> As C.S.P.'s intellectual descendant (Peirce taught Edgar A. Singer, who
> taught Thomas A. Cowan, who begat John Cowan), I agree.  There is support
> from graph theory: graph nexi with more than three edges can be
> reduced to more nexi with fewer edges, but not further.  (Informally:
> if you have many ropes, and are only allowed to make knots in 2 ropes
> at a time, the best you can do is one big rope or a loop; if you are
> allowed to knot 3 ropes together, you can make an arbitrarily complicated
> web; knotting 4 or more together doesn't make it more complicated.)
Oh, I forgot about knot theory. That is the best explanation,
because only a few conlangers care much for mathematics.
I have been thinking of using "3 points define a plane",
but am afraid someone will object "fractals!", so I don't.

Still, I think that really the null must always be included.
Such as, "leave some untied". I think we need adj, verb, noun,
AND particle/adverb; subject, verb, object, AND oblique.
We being mythical Tomato.