Re: Types of numerals

On 1/17/06, tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...> wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, John Vertical <johnvertical@H...>
> > wrote:
> How are "either" and "neither" similar to "both"?
>
> > These seem to be related to the logical
> > connectivities AND, NOR and OR.
>
> Oh, I get it.
> both --- and
> either --- or
> neither --- nor
>
> > NAND and XOR would be easy additions to this
> > family, were they not tricky to generalize for
> > more than 2 arguments.
>
> XOR is commutative and associative -- it should present no problems
> generalizing to any finite positive number of arguments.
Actually, I think that the usage of English
"either... or" corresponds more often to
XOR than OR.    Generalizing XOR to
more than two arguments would be
"either ... or .... or ....", i.e. "exactly one of
a, b, c, ... or z".  Generalizing OR to
three or more arguments would require
something like "one or more or all of
a, b, c, ... or z".

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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