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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: The logic of "and" and "but"
Message-ID: <D4Gv1z.4o5@indirect.com>
Sender: usenet@indirect.com (Internet Direct Admin)
Organization: Department of Redundancy Department
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 18:51:35 GMT
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Not so very long ago, andre@shappski.demon.co.uk said...
>While doing nothing in particular it suddenly struck me that from a 
>strictly logical (as in maths) point of view, the words "and" and "but" 
>mean exactly the same thing. In fact there is a word in Russian "a", 
>which means both, although there are also separate words that mean 
>"and" and "but" respectively. Are there any languages that have only 
>the one word?

  I think Hebrew has a word for "but", but most of the time I see the 
vav-prefix (pronounced "v" or "u") used to mean either "and" or "but".
  In Greek, the word for "and" is "kai", and for "but" is "alla", but 
there is another word, "de", which technically means "on the other hand" 
(in response to the word "men" used earlier, meaning "on the one hand").  
I appears to be the second word of about two sentences out of three in 
the New Testament, and is sometimes translated "and", sometimes "but" and 
sometimes not translated at all.

>Also, I have never quite worked out what purpose is served by using 
>articles. Quite a few languages don't have them and there seems to be 
>no loss of comunication. In all the time I have been learning Russian 
>I've missed being able to distinguish between "a" piano and "the" piano 
>only once and/but managed easily to route my way around it even at my 
>level.

  Since there are languages that have no articles, it should be impossible
to prove that they are absolutely necessary, but it appears that they are 
useful to the languages that use them.
  Latin had no articles, but the Romance languages that are Latin's 
descendants all have them.
  I believe that when Zamenhof was first designing Esperanto, he did not 
have articles (since his native language didn't have one), but later he 
added a definite article because it appeared useful.
  Indefinite articles exist, but appear not to be as useful.  Hebrew, 
Greek, and Esperanto (and if I remember right, Chinese and Hawaiian as 
well) have definite articles only.

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
--------------------------oOOo--(_)--oOOo----------------------------------
        Help stamp out, eliminate, and abolish redundancy!
