Re: Trivalent logic in Aymara?

On 14 Jun 99, at 16:12, FFlores wrote:

> I just finished reading Eco's book and I found
> a very interesting passage towards the end [1]
> that I'd like to comment. According to it, the
> Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio described the Aymara
> language (still spoken in parts of Bolivia and Peru)
> as "a language of extraordinary flexibility, with
> an incredible ability to create neologisms, and
> especially adequate for the use of abstractions".
>
> Eco says that "recent studies have shown that
> Aymara is based on a trivalent logic system instead
> of the bivalent logic (true/false) on which the
> Western thought is based, thus being capable of
> expressing modal subtleties that our Western
> languages can only express by resorting to
> unwieldy periphrases".
I've just re-read the passage in question and I haven't anything to
add from't.

>
>   [1] "The search for the perfect language", chapter 17,
>    "Conclusions", section "The translation" (Umberto Eco, 1993)
>
>
> Does anybody know anything about this "trivalent
> logic"? I assume that Aymara, same as Quechua and
> most (or all?) American languages, is heavily
> agglutinating and has a lot of attitudinal affixes
> and such (which would explain Bertonio's description),
> but I'd never heard of the trivalent system in this
> context -- and it sounds really intriguing (and cool
> to try). Have you seen anything like this in natlangs
> or experimented it in your conlangs?
I know of at least two forms of "three-valued logic" but I'm not sure
of specific linguistic applications.  Probability gives a third term
"maybe true and maybe false"; fuzzy logic gives a third term "partly
true and partly false."  Actually in both cases there is a whole
range of terms of the form "20% likely to be true and 80% likely to
be false" or "20% true and 80% false".

One of my conlangs had three modes of verb inflection: yes, no
and maybe, or in more traditional linguistic terms
indicative/imperative, negative indicative/imperative, and
future/subjunctive/question etc.

I expect I can add these distinctions into {gzb} with a set of (at
least) four modifier particles - some I already have.  But they would
be optional.

voqm  (indicative yes, definitely)
mwe   (imperative yes)
henx  (indicative no, not)
zxoq  (imperative no, not)
sqe   (probabilistic yes-or-no)
fjoq  (fuzzy logic yes-and-no)

The last two I just added.  I didn't think it
would make sense to have probabilistic or fuzzy
imperatives :) although I could use "mwe sqe" or
"mwe fjoq" if I wanted to be perverse. . .



Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/gzb/gzb.htm
*gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box goq.