Hallo conlangers!

On Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:41:29 -0600 Logan Kearsley wrote:

> On 19 April 2012 14:53, Jörg Rhiemeier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
> > On Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:48:06 +0100 R A Brown wrote:
> > [...]
> > This is true with many engelangs.  AFAIK, Loglan and Lojban also
> > do not distinguish between nouns, adjectives and verbs - from the
> > standpoint of formal logic, they all denote predicates, and are
> > thus treated the same in these languages.
> 
> Due to puzzling over how to distinguish different possible projections
> of embedded clauses in Palno, I have come to the conclusion that that
> is really an erroneous assumption (that "they all denotes
> predicates"), insofar as it implies that they all denote the same kind
> of thing.
> In logic at least, a predicate is something with a truth value- an
> assertion about the arguments. But a noun or an adjective by itself
> has no truth value; "dog" is not a predicate, it's a symbol that can
> be bound to a real-world referent within a particular discourse
> environment*.

Oh, nouns *can* be used predicatively, as in the sentence "Fido
is a dog".  One can say that "dog" is a unary predicate.  There
are even nouns that are predicates with more than one argument,
such as "father".

Certainly, a physical object such as a dog is something else than
an action such as biting.  But still, a noun is an operator that
cuts out a set of items from the set of all items, and thus a
predicate.

> [...]
> If we interpret "predicate" in a more languagey and less logicy way
> and just say that a predicate is any kind of logical function, whose
> result can be anything (not just a truth value), then the
> generalization that nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all part of that
> class makes sense.

A predicate is a function that takes zero or more arguments and
outputs a truth value (which is equivalent to cutting a set out
of a universe).  Examples of predicates are:

"X barks"
"X bites Y"
"X gives Y to Z"
"X is shaggy"
"X is a dog"
"X is the father of Y"

These can be written as:

bark (X)
bite (X,Y)
give (X,Y,Z)
shaggy (X)
dog (X)
father (X,Y)

While English uses the crutch of a copula when a noun or an
adjective is used predicatively, Lojban gets along without it
and treats all content words as predicate symbols.

At least, that is how I understand it.

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