Timeline for Is there any language with an "if and only if" word?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 16 at 20:41 | comment | added | apropos | English does have this: iff. It is very commonly used in ordinary language and casual conversation by mathematicians, computer scientists, and logicians. | |
| Oct 16 at 14:54 | comment | added | Juandev | Could be languages like Quechua. Even "if and only if" is an artificial term, some languages creates sense and squize it to one word. One such example is Quechua. | |
| Oct 11 at 8:16 | comment | added | J D | @JanusBahsJacquet IFF means A implies B and B implies A. "I'm breathing if and only if I'm alive" -> "If I'm breathing, then I'm alive" and "If I'm alive, I'm breathing." Where one is true, the other must. (Hey there Julius! Wondering where you've been. Saw your proposal on Codidact. ) | |
| Oct 10 at 11:16 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | For those of us not conversant in formal logic, can you explain how the difference between taking two propositions rather than two terms would translate to natural language? As it is, I don’t really understand what the difference would be. ‘If and only if’ doesn’t really mean anything different from plain ‘if’ in natural language, except inasmuch as it emphasises the required nature of the condition; in that way, it’s no different from ‘when and only when’, ‘this and only this’ or any other ‘X and only X’ construction. | |
| Oct 10 at 5:12 | comment | added | Chris Sanders | Joke on the side: the great mathematician Serre remarked that in the notation of mathematical research papers, "if and only if" became iff, "si et seulement si" became sssi, and "dann und nur dann" became dannnnn. | |
| Oct 10 at 2:47 | history | asked | Julius Hamilton | CC BY-SA 4.0 |