Re: Kinds of Negation

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 23:09:24 -0400, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
wrote:

>On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 08:04:51PM -0400, Jeffrey S. Jones wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> Lately, I've been thinking about different kinds of negation. I've
>> looked through the relevant lojban chapter, but I'm wondering how these
>> could be handled in an artlang. I'm especially looking for something
>> that's reasonably unambiguous while being reasonably natural.
>
>I don't know how natural it is, but Ebisedian has 3 types of negatives
>(explained below).
>
>> In the early days of 'Yemls, I specified a prefix {YO} as a "logical
>> negative" but wasn't careful about what that meant and absentmindedly
>> used it in 2 different ways:
>> A) indicating the boolean negation of the entire clause
>> B) indicating the negative of a set of entities i.e. whatever isn't in
>> the named set.
>
>Ebisedian uses the nullar number for (B), and a negation particle for (A).
>The nullar number simply indicates the absence of a noun; while the
>negation particles negate the sentence.
>
>Examples:
>1) mw'p3z3d3 juli'r.    "There is no man in the house."
>   man(nul)  house(loc)
>
>2) my'e p33'z3d3 juli'r. "It is not true that the man is in the house. "
>   NEG  man(cvy) house(loc)
That seems reasonably naturalistic. I don't know if it would fit 'Yemls.

>There is a third type of "negative" which indicates opposition, rather
>than absence. It's not strictly on par with the above two negatives, but
>Ebisedian does distinguish between "X is not true" and "not-X is true".
>For example, if somebody claimed "all dogs are white", you could respond
>in one of the following ways:
>- _ji'e_ (yes, all dogs are white)
>- _my'e_ (no, some dogs aren't white---negation of universal quantifier)
>- _khe'e_ (no, no dogs are white---universal quantifier on negation of the
>  statement)
That's a nice way to do it. For 'Yemls, though, I'm trying to keep the
number of distinct grammatical morphemes to a minimum.

>> Interpretation A
>> #  'Yemls    --- literal translation    --- free translation
>> 1. dOg: TqB    --- dog(s are) tree(s)    --- (all) dogs are trees
>
>Hmm, it seems that you would want to explicitly state the quantifier?
>E.g., a word for "all".
Probably -- but I haven't figured out what the word for "all" is yet.
Without the quantifier it actually means something like "all but the
exceptions". For the moment I'm pretending it just means "all"

>> 2. a dOg: TqB    --- at-least-1 dog (is a) tree    --- some dogs are
>> trees
>> 3. dOg: YOTqB    --- [it's false that] dog(s are) tree(s)    --- not all
>> dogs are trees
>> 4. a dOg: YOTqB    --- [it's false that] at-least-1 dog (is a)
>> e    --- no dog is a tree
>
>Hmm, 3 and 4 seem counterintuitive to me. I'd expect them to be the other
>way round.
I agree, but I did work out the logic, omitted, because I use my own
symbols in ASCII. The reason for this interpretation has to do mainly with
conditional statements, the form being:

    {OD} negative-of-condition {OD} conclusion

{OD} is also the word for inclusive OR. With Interpretation A, all I have
to do is stick {YO} into the condition to get the negative (or remove it if
the condition already had it). With Interpretation B, I also have to mess
with the quantifiers.

>> Interpretation B
>> #  'Yemls    --- literal translation    --- free translation
>> 1. dOg: TqB    --- dog(s are) tree(s)    --- (all) dogs are trees
>> 2. a dOg: TqB    --- at-least-1 dog (is a) tree    --- some dogs are
>> trees
>> 3. dOg: YOTqB    --- dog(s are) non-tree(s)    --- no dog is a tree
>> 4. a dOg: YOTqB    --- at-least-1 dog (is a) non-tree    --- not all
>> dogs are trees
>
>This seems better.
I like this better too. It makes adjectival usage easier to explain.

Jeff

>
>T
>
>--
>Let's not fight disease by killing the patient. -- Sean 'Shaleh' Perry